INFORMATION

AGE
 ABOUT US
Traces the development of the information age anddiscusses
its impact on society. It tackles the various ways the
information age and social media have influenced
society and human lives.

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BEGINNING OF
COMMUNICATION
Johannes Gutenberg invented the
printing press around 1440. This
invention was a result of finding a way
to improve the manual, tedious, and
slow printing methods. A printing press
is a device that applies pressure to an
inked surface lying on a print medium,
such as cloth or paper, to transfer ink.
Gutenberg’s hand mould printing press
led to the creation of metal movable
type.
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 BEGINNING OF
COMMUNICATION
Later, the two inventions were
combined to make printing methods
faster and they drastically reduced the
costs of printing documents. The
beginnings of mass communication can
be traced back to the invention of the
printing press. The development of a
fast and easy way of disseminating
information in print permanently
reformed the structure of society.
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 POLITICAL AND
RELIGIOUS
Authorities who took pride in being
learned were threatened by the sudden
rise of literacy among people. With the
rise of the printing press, the printing
revolution occurred which illustrated the
tremendous social change brought by the
wide circulation of information. The
printing press made the mass production
of books possible which made books
accessible not only to the upper class. 5
 POLITICAL AND
RELIGIOUS
As years progressed, calculations
became involved in communication
due to the rapid developments in the
trade sector. Back then, people who
compiled actuarial tables and did
engineering calculations served as
“computers”.
THERISEOFPRINTINGPRESS

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 ENIGMA
During World War II, the Allies
(US, Canada, Britain, France,
USSR, Australia, etc.) countries
that opposed the Axis powers
(Germany, Japan, Italy, Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria), were
challenged with a serious shortage
of human computers for military
calculations.
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 ENIGMA
When soldiers left for war, the shortage got
worse, so the United States addressed the
problem by creating the Harvard Mark 1, a
general purpose electromechanical computer
that was 50 feet long and capable of doing
calculations in seconds that usually took
people hours. At the same time, Britain
needed mathematicians to crack the German
Navy’s Enigma code. The Enigma was an
enciphering machine that the German armed
forces used to securely send messages.

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 ALAN TURING
An English Mathematician was hired in
1936 by the British top-secret Government
Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park
to break the Enigma code. His code-
breaking methods became an industrial
process having 12,000 people working
24/7. To counteract this, the Nazi’s made
the Enigma more complicated having
approximately 10114 possible
permutations of every encrypted message.
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 ALAN TURING
Turing, working on the side of the Allies, invented Bombe, an electromechanical
machine that enabled the British to decipher encrypted messages of the German
Enigma machine. This contribution of Turing along with other cryptologists
shortened the war by two years (Munro, 2012). In his paper On Computable
Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem, first published in
1937, Turing presented a theoretical machine called the Turing machine that can
solve any problem from simple instructions encoded on a paper tape. He also
demonstrated the simulation of the Turing machine to construct a single Universal
machine. This became the foundation of computer science and the invention of a
machine later called computer, that can solve any problem by performing any task
from a written program (DeHaan, 2012).
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 APPLE COMPUTER 1
In the 1970’sthe generation who witnessed
the drawn of the computer age was
described as the generation with
“electronic brains.” The people in this
generation were the first to be introduced
to personal computers (PCs). Back then,
the Homebrew Computer Club, an early
computer hobbyist group, gathered
regularly to trade parts of computer
hardware and talked about how to make
computers more accessible to everyone.
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 APPLE COMPUTER 1
Many members of the club ended up being high-
profile entrepreneurs, including the founders of
Apple Inc. In 1976 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of
Apple Inc., developed the computer that made
him famous: the Apple 1. Wozniak designed the
operating system, hardware, and circuit board of
the computer all by himself. Steve Jobs,
Wozniak’s friend, suggested to sell the Apple 1
as a fully assembled printed circuit board. This
jumpstarted their career as founders of Apple
Inc.
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 SOCIAL MEDIA
MEDIA PLATFORMS Messaging, video and voice
calling services (Viber, Skype), blogging
platform, image and video hosting websites
(Flicker). From 1973 onward, social media
platforms were introduced from variations of
multi-user chat rooms; instant-messaging
applications (AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN
messenger, Windows messenger). Bulletin-
board forum systems, game-based social
networking sites such as facebook, Friendster,
myspace, and business-oriented social
networking websites like Xing.

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 APPS
Discovery and dating-oriented websites
(Tagged and Tinder), video sharing services
(Youtube), real-time social media feed
aggregator (FriendFeed), live-streaming
([Link], [Link]).
• Photo-video sharing websites (Pinterest,
Instragram, Snapchat, Keek, Vine) and
question –and –answer platforms (Quora).
• To date, these social media platforms
enable information exchange at its most
efficient level. 14
 APPS
Is a type of software that can be
installed and run on a computer,
tablet, smartphone or other
electronic devices. An app most
frequently refers to a mobile
application or a piece of software
that is installed and used on a
computer. Most apps have a
specific and narrow function.
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 INSTANT MESSAGES
USEFUL APPS
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS PROFITING
THROUGH CONTENT MAKING THE
INFORMATION AGE M O D E R N I N T E R N
E T The information age, which progressed
from the invention of the printing press to
the development of numerous social media
platforms, has immensely influenced the
lives of the people. The impact of these
innovations can be advantageous or
disadvantageous depending on the use of
these technologies.
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 KNOWN SOCIAL MEDIA FLATFORMS

TIKTOK INSTAGRAM TWITTER FACEBOOK

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END