11-03-2018, 10:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-03-2018, 10:48 AM by Bill the Piper.)
(10-29-2018, 12:38 PM)David Horn Wrote: The Information Age is a bit of a misnomer. It's less about information, per se, and more about easy access to it, but that's a quibble. The advent of computers is the technological precursor, but the cultural impacts were due to the rise of the PC, the internet and digital cellphones. Has our thinking changed all that much due to Facebook and Twitter? I don't think so. So a marker for that transition is somewhere in the 1990-2005 range. A follow-on Age will emerge soon, but what it will encompass and what it will be called is still TBD.
Remember than even in the early 2000s, a common pop culture trope was "computers are for nerds". Prince of Persia games were cool, but it was social media that started the Information Age. Another thread attributes the success of Trump to an online board called 4chan. What would be the equivalent in 2002? People sending text messages on their Nokia 3310s?
The next Age? Assuming the current 4T ends well, I see two possibilities:
-Transhuman Age - if the next technological revolution is the use of biotech to ennoble (or pervert) human nature
-Interplanetary Age - if the next revolution is the creation of settlements in outer space
The transition could coincide with next 4T, around the 2090s.