Living the Information Age


I remember when our family bought our first colour TV. (This was a few years after watching Neil walk on the moon in black and white.) I can remember our first video game: Pong. It was so 70’s cool to be batting that little rectangle around the screen ...bloop….bloop-bloop. I remember seeing the room-sized mainframe computer displayed in the bank window at John and Main and being amazed. Then, twenty years later, I experienced the pride and nervous trepidation of buying my first 386.
In my lifetime, phones became mobile, music became ubiquitous, computers became necessary, and information came to be instantaneously flashed around the world.
. “…sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances.” (Innis:15) Now everyone is connected. There are 6 billion of us, twice as many as when I was born. The cultural shock waves are evident all around us. We are seeing the end of privacy, the end of cultures existing in isolation, and the end of many of our illusions. How are we coping with all these disturbances? Einstein summed it up: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
Now the 21st century is here, with even faster rates of change. “Moore's Law equates to an average performance improvement in the industry as a whole of over 1% per week.” Wikpedia Are we headed for a Technological Singularity? This article: Quantum Communication Breakthrough is both scary and exciting, incomprehensibly pointing the way that lies ahead.

Reference:
Innis, Harold 1991 Minerva's Owl University of Toronto Press