STS-Lesson 9 - The Information Age

THE INFORMATION AGE
STS 101 – LESSON 9

INTRODUCTION
• Highly modernized, automated, data-driven, and
technologically advanced-these best describe our
society nowadays, as evidenced by how information
could be transferred or shared quickly.
• Life is accompanied by endless transmission of
information that takes place within and outside the
human body.
• The information Age is defined as a “period starting in
the last quarter of the 20th century when information
became effortlessly accessible through publications and
through the management of information by computers
and computer networks.”
• The Information Age is also called the Digital Age and
the New Media Age because it was associated with the
development of computers.
HISTORY
YEAR EVENT
3000 BC Summerian writing system used pictographs to represent words.
2900 BC Beginnings of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
1300 BC Tortoise shell and oracle bone writing were used.
500 BC Papyrus roll was used.
220 BC Chinese small seal writing was developed.
100 AD Book (parchment codex)
105 AD Woodblock printing paper was invented by the Chinese.
1455 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press using movable mental type.
1755 Samuel Johnson’s dictionary standardized English spelling.
1802 The Library of Congress was established.
Invention of the carbon arc lamp.
1824 Research on persistence of vision published.
1830s First viable design for a digital computer.
Augusta Lady Byron writes the world’s first computer program.
HISTORY
YEAR EVENT
1837 Invention of the telegraph in Great Britain and the United States.
1861 Motion pictures were projected onto a screen.
1876 Dewey Decimal system was introduced.
1877 Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated high-speed photography.
1899 First magnetic recordings were released.
1902 Motion picture special effects were used.
1906 Lee DeForest invented the electronic amplifying tube (triode)
1923 Television camera tube was invented by Zvorkyn.
1926 First practical sound movie.
1939 Regularly scheduled television broadcasting began in the US.
1940s Beginnings of information science as a discipline.
1945 Vannevar Bush foresaw the invention of hypertext.
1946 ENIAC computer was developed.
HISTORY
YEAR EVENT
1948 Birth of field-of-information theory proposed by Claude E. Shannon.
1957 Planar transistor was developed by Jean Hoerni
1958 First integrated circuit.
1960s Library of Congress developed LC MARC (machine-readable code)
1969 UNIX operating system was developed, which could handle multitasking.
1971 Intel introduced the first microprocessor chip.
1972 Optical laserdisc was developed by Philips and MCA.
1974 MCA and Philips agreed on a standard videodisc encoding format.
1975 Altair Microcomputer Kit was released: first personal computer for the public.
1977 RadioShack introduced the first complete personal computer.
1984 Apple Macintosh computer was introduced.
Mid 1980s Artificial Intelligence was separated from information science.
1987 Hypercard was developed by Bill Atkinson recipe box metaphor.
HISTORY
YEAR EVENT
1991 Four hundred fifty complete works of literature on one CD-ROM was released.
January 1997 RSA (encryption and network security software) Internet security code cracked for a 48-bit
number.
• As man evolved, information and its dissemination has also evolved in many ways.
Eventually, we no longer kept them to ourselves; instead, we share them and manage
them in different means.
• Information got ahead of us. It started to grow at a rate we were unprepared to
handle.
• Information was the preferred medium of exchange and the information managers
served as information officers.
• In the present generation, there is no doubt that information has turned out to be a
commodity, an overdeveloped product, mass-produced, and unspecialized. Soon, we
become overloaded with it.
THE WORLD WIDE WEB (INTERNET)
• Several historians trace the origin of the Internet to Claude E. Shannon, an
American Mathematician who was considered as the Father of Information
Theory.” He worked at Bell Laboratories and at age 32, he published a paper
proposing that information can be quantitatively encoded as a sequence of ones
and zeroes.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page, directors of a Stanford research project, built a search
engine that listed results to reflect page popularity when they determined that
the most popular result would frequently be the most usable.
• Consequently, companies whose businesses are built on digitalized information
have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time; the
current Information Age has spawned its own breed of wealthy influential
brokers, from Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Apple’s Steve Jobs to Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg.
APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN SCIENCE AND RESEARCH
• One of the significant applications of computers for science and research is evident in the
field of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to store,
organize, and analyze vast amount of biological data which is available in the form of
sequences and structures of proteins-the building blocks of organisms and nucleic acids-the
information carrier.
• Early interest in bioinformatics was established because of a need to create databases of
biological sequences. The human brain cannot store all the genetic sequences of organisms
and this huge amount of data can only be stored, analyzed, and be used efficiently with the
use of computers.
• The sequence information generated by the human genome research, initiated in 1988, has
now been stored as a primary information source for future applications in medicine.
• Moreover, from the pharmaceutical industry’s point of view, bioinformatics is the key to
rational drug discovery. It reduces the number of trials in the screening of drug compounds
and in identifying potential drug targets for a particular disease using high-power computing
workstations and software like Insight.
• In plant bio-technology, bioinformatics is found to be useful in the areas of identifying
diseases resistance genes and designing plants with high nutrition value.
HOW TO CHECK THE RELIABILITY OF WEB SOURCES
 Does the author provide his or her credentials?

 What type of expertise does he or she have on the subject he or she is writing
about? Does he or she indicate what his or her education is?
 What type of experience does he or she have? Should you trust his or her
knowledge of the subject?
 What kinds of websites are associated with the author’s name? Is he or she
affiliated with any educational institution?
 Do commercial sites come up? Do the websites associated with the author
give you any clues to particular biases the author might have?
 Look at the domain name of the website that will tell you who is hosting the
site.
 Search the domain name at http://www.whois.sc/. This site provides
information about the owners of registered domain names. What is the
organization’s main purpose? Check the organization’s main website, if it has
one. Is it educational? Commercial? Is it a reputable organization?
 Do not ignore the suffix on the domain name (the three-letter part that
comes after the “.”). Here are some examples:
.edu = educational , .com = commercial , .gov = government
 To sell a product?
 As a personal hobby?
 As public service?
 To further scholarship on a topic?
 To provide general information on a topic?
 To persuade you of a particular point of view?
Scholars or general public?

Which age group is written for?
Is it aimed at people from a particular
geographic area?
Is it aimed at members of a particular
profession or with specific training?
 Timeliness: When was the website first published? Is it

regularly updated? Check for dates at the bottom of each
page on the site.
 Does the author cite sources? Just as in print sources, web
sources that cite their sources are considered more reliable.
 What type of other sites does the website link to? Are they
reputable sites?
 What types of sites link to the website you are evaluating? Is
the website being cited by others?
EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE WEB SOURCES
EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE WEB SOURCES

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THE INFORMATION AGE

STS 101 – LESSON 9

 Does the author provide his or her credentials?

Scholars or general public?

 Timeliness: When was the website first published? Is it

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