So I came across this entry in Wikipedia on the “Information Age,”:

‘Information Age’ is a name given to a period after the industrial age and before the Knowledge Economy. Information Age is a term applied to the period where movement of information became faster than physical movement, more narrowly applying to the 1980s onward. Under conventional economic theory, the Information Age also heralded the era where information was a scarce resource and its capture and distribution generated competitive advantage. Microsoft became one of the largest companies in the world based on its influence in creating the underlying mechanics to facilitate information distribution. It has been estimated that the Information Age lasted from approximately 1971 to 1991.

The superficial problems with this are as follows: an  Economy does not follow an Age, only another Age does.  And a 20-year-long Age? That is more like a Blip. How can information travel faster than physical electrons? If this entry only refers to the transportation of information, then the Information Age was heralded by the steam engine. But that sounds nit-picky.

The most interesting thing about this Wikipedia entry (a resource that I find invaluable, but not for the reasons Wikipedia would like), is that it is a perfect example of how stuck we still are in Industrial-Age thinking about Information. The metaphors come thick and fast: it is resource, that can be moved at a certain speed, it is scarce, and it can be captured and distributed. In other words, Information is Raw Material, only slightly more elusive than coal.

I propose two attributes define the transition from the Industrial to the Information Age.

1. Shifting from power, energy, force, mechanical, self-contained, and “closed system” concepts, metaphors, ways of thinking, to informational, hermeneutic, epistemological, organic, inter-connected, and “open system” concepts, metaphors, and ways of thinking about things

2. Shifting from physical “forms of instantiation” of products and services to informational, digital, virtual, software forms of instantiation

And on there hangs a tail… I guess this is too much to go into right now. But what I think we can say is that we are a very long way from #1, and that most of our attempts at #2 are quite primitive because we are such a long way from #1.

What are the disciplines to pave the way for changing our thinking from Industrial Age ways to Information Age ways? They are General Systems Theory, Cybernetics, Information and Communication Theory, and Developmental Stage Theory.