Republic of the Philippines

COTABATO FOUNDATION COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Doroluman, Arakan, Cotabato
Telefax: (064) 288-1343
Email Address: cfcstedu@gmail.com; Website: www.cfcst.edu.ph

MODULE 3

Specific Issues in Science, Technology, and Society

This module tackles specific issues in science and technology in the context of the
information age, biodiversity and health, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and gene therapy,
nanotechnology, and climate change and environmental awareness. By critiquing specific issues in
science and technology in the context of how these affect human lives, the module aims to empower
students toward a renewed understanding and appreciation of science and technology in the present
context of society.

Lesson 1
Information Age

This section traces the development of the information age and discusses its impact on
society. It tackles the various ways the information age and social media have influenced society and
human lives.

Desired Learning Outcomes

At the end of this section, the students should be able to:

1. trace the development of the information age from the introduction of Gutenberg’s presses
up to the era of social media;
2. determine the impact of the information age to society; and
3. analyse the ways in which the information age and social media influence human lives.

Diagnostics

Instructions: Answer the questions that follow.

______1. Who invented the printing press?

______ 2. When was the printing press invented?
______ 3. What device first compiled actuarial tables, did engineering calculations, and served as
computers?
______ 4. Who is the Father of the Computer Age?
______ 5. What electromechanical machine enabled the British to read all daily German naval
Enigma traffic?
______ 6. What machine can solve any problem and perform any task from a written a program?
______ 7. Who is the Filipino engineer who created the new silicon chip?
______ 8. Who build a simple computer with around 8080 microprocessors that were hooked up to a
keyboard and television?
______ 9. What did Steve Jobs call the computer describe in no.8?
______ 10. Who is the creator of Microsoft?

German goldsmith, 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
 Republic of the Philippines
COTABATO FOUNDATION COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Doroluman, Arakan, Cotabato
Telefax: (064) 288-1343
Email Address: cfcstedu@gmail.com; Website: www.cfcst.edu.ph

movable type. 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. 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.

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.” During World War II, the Allies (U.S., 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 computer
for military calculations. 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 mathematician to crack the German Navy’s Enigma code.
The Enigma was an enciphering machine that the German armed forces used to securely send
messages.

Alan Turing, and 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 Nazis made the Enigma more complicated having approximately
10(114) possible permutations of every encrypted message. 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 the two years (Munro, 2012).

In his paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entsheidungsproblem, first

published in 1973, Turing presented a theoretical machine called the Turing machine that can solve
any problem from simple instruction encoded on a paper tape. He also demonstrated the simulation of
the Turing machine to construct a single Universal Machined. This became the foundation of
computer science and the invention of a machine later called a computer, the can solve any problem
by performing any task from a written program (DeHaan, 2012).

In the 1970’s, the generation who witnessed the dawn of the computer age was described as
the generation with “electronic brains.” The people of 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. 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 I. 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 I as a fully assembled printed circuit board. This jumpstarted their career
as founders of Apple Inc.
 Republic of the Philippines
COTABATO FOUNDATION COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Doroluman, Arakan, Cotabato
Telefax: (064) 288-1343
Email Address: cfcstedu@gmail.com; Website: www.cfcst.edu.ph

From 1973 onward, social media platforms were introduced from variations of multi-user chat
rooms; instant-messaging applications (e.g., AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Windows
messenger); bulletin-board forum systems, game-based social networking sites (e.g., Facebook,
Friendster, Myspace) and business-oriented social networking website (e.g., Xing); messaging, video
and voice calling services (e.g., Viber, Skype); blogging platform, image and video hosting websites
(e.g., Flicker); discovery and dating-oriented websites (e.g., Tagged, Tinder); video sharing services
(e.g, YouTube); real-time social media feed aggregator (e.g., FriendFeed); live-streaming (e.g.,
Justin.tv, Twitch.tv); photo-video sharing websites (e.g., Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Keek, Vine);
and question-and-answer platforms (e.g., Quora). To date, these social media platforms enable
information exchange at its most efficient level.

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.

Assessment Task 1. Documentary Film Viewing and Reflection

Name: _______________________________________ Date Submitted: ________________

Course/Section: _______________________________

Instructions: Watch the 2018 documentary The Internet Revolution and Digital Future Technology
on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9xAFAO7USA). Then, write a short essay of
300-500 words on the topic, “What is the impact of the information revolution on my learning in
school?”

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 Republic of the Philippines
COTABATO FOUNDATION COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Doroluman, Arakan, Cotabato
Telefax: (064) 288-1343
Email Address: cfcstedu@gmail.com; Website: www.cfcst.edu.ph

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 Republic of the Philippines
COTABATO FOUNDATION COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Doroluman, Arakan, Cotabato
Telefax: (064) 288-1343
Email Address: cfcstedu@gmail.com; Website: www.cfcst.edu.ph