History of the Information Age

The first introduction I read was Broad Bands by Claire L. Evans. I found this introduction to be interesting because of its focus on multiple women’s impact and involvement in the development of technology by working with computers. Evans uses this introduction to show the significance of understanding the role women had in the technology …

In the introduction to his book, Media Technology And Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet, Brian Winston argues that the history of the Information Age should not be looked at as a liner time. Rather, it should be looked at as an intersection of science and technology. He describes when we are […]

Brian Winston’s “Media Technology and Examining Society: A History From the Telegraph to the Internet” does not advocate for a per say a”revolutionary” Information Age. Winston argues that calling the Information Age a sort of technological “evolution” is misguided. He referenced the relationship of the social sphere, technology, and science as drawn from Saussurian linguistics […]

For the two introductions, I read The Information by James Gleick and The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald R. Kline. My immediate reaction for the first introduction by James Gleick was how impressive Claude Shannon was. Originally, I wanted to be an English major, because I genuinely love words and finding out each word’s etymology.  After […]

I read the chapter from Broad Bands by Claire Evans. I chose to read this article because of the fact that it was about women and the first computers. I was extremely fascinated by the history of females within science and math before the start of the modern information age. I think Evans highlighted the importance of females in this field by writing this book. Female contributions to many aspects of society and history often go unnoticed, so I think Evans really intended for her chapter to shed light on these contributions to the information age because it is a really big part of human history. “It was female mental laborers, breaking intractable problems down into numerical steps much as machines tackle problems today, who ushered in the age of large-scale scientific research,” wrote Evans.1 After reading this chapter, I would love to learn more about women like Ada & Katherine and other underrepresented figures in the history of the information age in our class. The second source I read was The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald Kline. In his article, he analyzes the narrative of the information age & writes about the history of cybernetics and information theory. He mentions how the emergence of cybernetics influenced society during the information age through different forms of media and communication, such as influencing the science fiction genre. Kline’s purpose in his article is to demonstrate how cybernetics and information theory can help us to understand the society that we currently live in. He sees these aspects as ways to define what the information age is. Kline’s article reinforces the idea of what is defined as the information age & how it started following WWII. Exploring this era would be important because it is when many scientists are coming up with different theories about technology. This source was somewhat different from Evan’s chapter but I still think it is important to note the evolution of the modern information age as Kline has done in his chapter. Claire Evans, The Untold Stories of the Women Who Made the Internet, 11. Norfolk Journal and Guide, “Paving the Way For Women Engineers,” May 8, 1943.

Media Technology and Society: Brian Winston. In Winston’s introduction, he sees the emergence of technology evolves alongside society and is not part of an ‘Information Revolution’ or ‘Information Age’. Winston explains the connection between society and technology through a model that shows the evolution of technology based on the needs of society. The model visualizes […]