From the Information Age to the Networking Age

So far we've established that a) Technology matters greatly, and b) The structure or architecture of that technology gives us hints as to how it might change business and society over time.    What kind of architectural changes did air travel introduce?  How did they change business and society?  What about the shift from CDs to MP3's?  What changes did that usher in?

While you think about that for awhile, let's proceed. Are you wondering about this Networking Age business I speak of? Is it just another way of saying the Information Age?  or the Digital Age?  Let's just see.

This glossary says: 

Information Age
The era, following the industrial age, in which computers are used by the masses and knowledge workers, whose work focuses on the use and manipulation of digital data, outnumber factory workers.

Ok.  We've all heard of the industrial age.  Most of us have heard of the stone age, the bronze age, or the iron age.  This glossary entry is suggesting that the information age is the next step, or our current step, which overlaps the old industrial age, in our development as a society.  This in itself is fascinating.....an information age describes a time when the dominance of asset-driven, manufacturing-oriented, physical processes is eclipsed by a new bias towards the intangible --knowledge, information, media, the virtual-- an age where ideas matter more than assets.   Very important.

But did the Information Age exist before the advent of the Internet?   Computers have existed for some 60+ years.   Many claim that the concept of the Information age isn't particularly new.  According to this source historians tend to look for these beginnings with either the rise of railroads, the establishment of telegraphy or mass-circulation newspapers, or with the invention of the printing press.  But something clearly is new...and very profound.  The grip of the Information Age has tightened a great deal over these last few decades.   What's happening?

I use the term Networking Age to describe this new era we're still beginning.   Computers are caught up in the idea of course.  Advances in mobile technologies, microcomputing, and nanotechnology, are important, for example.  But computers have been around for some 60+ years.   It's a new technology, its (relatively) recent widespread adoption, and the novel approach to communication it presents, that lies at the heart of our current transformation.  It's the rich linking of our computers, and the new modes of say, production, distribution, knowledge, expression and control, that's most profound.   

The Internet changes EVERYTHING!

(p.s. advances in software, as we shall see, are hard at work here as well and should not be overlooked!)

Parable: From ENIAC to the bot-net

Consider the evolution of computing from the days of the old ENIAC to our current landscape where your network-enabled PC might someday be compromised and controlled by some insidious cracker as part of a broader bot-net.

Commissioned back in the early 1940's,  ENIAC was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of executing algorithmic problems.  Picture it - a hunderd feet long and over 1800 square feet in volume.....that's bigger than a lot of houses these days.    As big as it was, and as profound as it was as a computing breakthrough, the thing had very little computing power by todays standards and it could perform only a few specific functions.

ENIAC was designed as a data processing system.  Its parts were mostly custom built for the machine itself.   In other words its parts were of no use in other computers, if there were any.  It was one big rigid monolithic beast, a closed system.  If one part broke down the whole system would crash.   And by its very nature it was centralized.  There was no need to think about interoperability of data between it and any other any other machine - there weren't any others.   Only a few people knew how to program it, and again it could only perform a few specific tasks.

Over the second half of the twentieth century a new standard emerged that allow computer manufacturers to agree on how to represent data in a simple format, a kind of mathematical language spoken by all computers, called binary code....and this opens up new possibilities for making computers more efficient and more interoperable. Fast forward a few decades and the mainframe computer was born.  Mainframe computing was all about centralizing computing power, even while users accessed machine through their own consoles.  Then as technology progressed, mini-computers, as they were called emerged, which were smaller and more multi-purpose - but still not as small or multi-purpose as the computers we know of today. 

Fast forward to the late 70's, early 80's and the PC emerges.  Computing power, and the force of Moore's law is helping to make it cost effective to make cheaper yet more powerful computer components - cheap enough for the average household to afford.  By this time computers are becoming truly multi-purpose in nature, they're used for managing documents and spreadsheets, playing games, managing sales orders and so on.  And to some extent their components are becoming more standard and more interoperable.  There are new ways for transporting data between computers, for instance.   But behind the scenes even the early PC's are still largely concerned with the same thing the ENIAC was concenred with - crunching numbers.  The big difference of course is that the new computers of the 80s and 90s, for example, could process millions of instructions per second and that kind of speed and sophistication meant that you could use a computer to build elegant user interfaces, motion graphics, and use these techniques to build all kinds of applications.

So, now enter the Internet.  The Internet creates a standard, low-level way of exchanging digital information for all kinds of purposes.  Even before the Internet Computers were beginning to be used more for communication purposes.....but the Internet really set off a chain reaction that led to a complete revolution in the way we designed and developed computers. What does it lead to?  It leads to a fairly rapid progression of decentralisation and decoupling of computing processes.  Computers today are almost indistinguishable from Computer networks.  Almost without exception they rely on software that is actually distributed on different computers around the world.  A software application then isn't something you find on a diskette or CD, necessarily.  It's really a group of smaller pieces of software being called upon, in sequence, to do a specific job wherever they are on the network and together complete some greater task.