# When did Industrial Age end and Information age begin?



## Blazkovitz (Mar 16, 2014)

Orion's Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - 270 BT to 30 AT: The Industrial Age
Orion's Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - 0030 to 0130 AT: The Information Age

The editors at Orion's Arm claim the boundary is the year 2000, but that's too lazy. My ideas:
-1991 - end of Bolshevism, first websites
-2006 - "You" (anonymous Internet user) chosen as Time's person of the year, MySpace is the first social media website to become fashionable


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## Conscience Killer (Sep 4, 2017)

I would say around the 90s. I was born in 1991 and I do not remember _pre-internet_ at all.


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## Blazkovitz (Mar 16, 2014)

I got an Internet connection in 2000 so that's when _I_ entered the Information Age. But I was aware of its existence at least in 1997.


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## knifey (Jun 25, 2017)

1984


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## Tropes (Jul 7, 2016)

RoseTylerFan said:


> Orion's Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - 270 BT to 30 AT: The Industrial Age
> Orion's Arm - Encyclopedia Galactica - 0030 to 0130 AT: The Information Age
> 
> The editors at Orion's Arm claim the boundary is the year 2000, but that's too lazy. My ideas:
> ...


If you are going by the history of social integration, 1991 makes sense, or 1995 for the specific network that took off. If you are going by the history of the technology, I would say WW2, with Colossus & ENIAC being the first "networked computers". 

P.S.
Don't post this in on Orion's Arm forum, they can be very snobby about trying to change existing lore.


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## dulcinea (Aug 22, 2011)

I always thought we were in a period in which both are overlapping. There is still a lot of industrialization, but it might be on it's way out within the next few decades. In my opinion, the industrial age, will completely end when automation and 3D printing replace factory work and other industrial fields. 

I agree that the information age came in the early 90's with the worldwide web. Not long afterwards, government, business, and other records started to be increasingly computerized; residents of giant mainframes with databases. I mean, there were computers since the 40's, but they weren't really widely used for personal and commercial use, the way they were, in the post altair world.


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## Euclid (Mar 20, 2014)

disinformation*


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## knifey (Jun 25, 2017)

dulcinea said:


> I always thought we were in a period in which both are overlapping. There is still a lot of industrialization, but it might be on it's way out within the next few decades. In my opinion, the industrial age, will completely end when automation and 3D printing replace factory work and other industrial fields.


I this is already the age of automation. Honestly I think it's already dominant, how many people have an electronic calendar reminding them when 50 years ago they would have hired an assistant? Tractors already use gps to drive themselves, even if the farmer is sitting in the cockpit... harvesting is mostly automated already. Amazon... most of the work is done with robots already, Tesla... most of the cars are made with robots. In my opinion if all the automation went away tomorrow, the labour force would need to more than double to compensate to keep doing everything in exactly the same way.


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## Blazkovitz (Mar 16, 2014)

dulcinea said:


> I always thought we were in a period in which both are overlapping. There is still a lot of industrialization, but it might be on it's way out within the next few decades. In my opinion, the industrial age, will completely end when automation and 3D printing replace factory work and other industrial fields.


I agree.

If you try to synchronize it with the Strauss-Howe generational cycles, a new cycle is scheduled to start in the 2020s, so that's might be a real end of the Industrial Age.


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## tanstaafl28 (Sep 10, 2012)

There's no one "moment" where one age became another, in my humble opinion. It was the product of several events and inventions coming together in such a way that one superseded the other. There's a combination of subtlety and shock to how it happens. It is as if we realize things are changing at the same time we've already adapted to the changes, and yet we're not exactly sure how we feel about it. As an example, I can distinctly remember a time when I was completely fine venturing out into the world without a portable _computer/GPS/look-up-just-about-anything-on-the-fly/communications_ device, in my pocket, but now the idea of leaving my smartphone at home fills me with a tremendous sense of dread/fear. Most of us carry a smartphone with us every day without realizing it has more than *1,000,000 TIMES* the computing power NASA used to put men on the moon nearly 50 years ago. 

While some thought should be given to the widespread establishment of a reliable electrical grid, as well as an interactive communications network, but, I think it really started with the explosion of commercial radio in the 20s. Suddenly, all you needed was a "box" in your house to get information that used to come a day later in the newspapers. Then the transistor came about in the late 40s. Then TV in the 50s. By the 60s, major companies were all using punched card computers for most of their records and transactions. The conversion from analog to digital is crucial to this process. Satellite communication was introduced. ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet) came online in 1969. The microchip also revolutionized the miniaturization of electronics that would continue throughout the rest of the 20th Century. 

Then there was a big "Energy Crunch" in the 1970s. Then President Nixon took the U.S. off the Gold standard and inflation began to creep into the system. This forced manufacturing companies to start looking for cheaper opportunities to produce their goods outside the United States. The job market in the U.S. became more of a goods and services economy instead of a manufacturing one, as a result. The U.S. couldn't compete with cheaper steel, and better, more economical cars, coming from overseas, as an example. 

The next big thing was the advent of the personal computer at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. The development of operating systems and software that made personal computing accessible to the masses came next. Then ARPANET began to be privatized into what we now know as the Internet, and the invention of HTML caused the World Wide Web to explode through the 90s. By 2000, we had Y2K and the Tech Bubble, both of which contributed to the reinforcing and building up of the infrastructure that would eventually provide us with a series of privately owned interconnected network backbones spanning the globe with near instantaneous data storage and transfer speeds we have today. Everything was pretty much in place by 1990, at the earliest and 2000 at the latest. 

So the transition took the better part of a Century to take place, from a "Big History" perspective. This is very much the way the Industrial Age overtook the previous Agrarian Age. It was a series of events and inventions over the course of a time that brought it about, not any one thing.


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## dulcinea (Aug 22, 2011)

RoseTylerFan said:


> I agree.
> 
> If you try to synchronize it with the Strauss-Howe generational cycles, a new cycle is scheduled to start in the 2020s, so that's might be a real end of the Industrial Age.


I do read that 2020 is supposed to be a pivotal year in tech, for some reason. Idk how they'd calculate that tho.


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## pwowq (Aug 7, 2016)

When did the industrial age start?


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## Blazkovitz (Mar 16, 2014)

pwowq said:


> When did the industrial age start?


According to Orion's Arm, in 1700.


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## Tropes (Jul 7, 2016)

RoseTylerFan said:


> According to Orion's Arm, in 1700.


I've heard historians marking the printing press, invented in the 1400s, as the opening of the industrial revolution.

I guess that kind of strengthens @tanstaafl28 's point - an age is more of a long social process then a chapter in a book, and you can't necessarily tie the process in a nice knot with a simple beginning and end... The problem is that you kind of have to when you decide to write about it, you have to start somewhere and end somewhere for it to fit the confines of the medium.


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## tanstaafl28 (Sep 10, 2012)

Tropes said:


> I've heard historians marking the printing press, invented in the 1400s, as the opening of the industrial revolution.
> 
> I guess that kind of strengthens @*tanstaafl28* 's point - an age is more of a long social process then a chapter in a book, and you can't necessarily tie the process in a nice knot with a simple beginning and end... The problem is that you kind of have to when you decide to write about it, you have to start somewhere and end somewhere for it to fit the confines of the medium.



And this gets me thinking again, in roughly 500 years, humanity went from information taking months, even years, to spread around the world, to it taking a fraction of seconds. Despite the fact that the Chinese invented movable type centuries before the West did (like most things) they didn't really have anyone to share their discoveries with. Anyway, you look at word-of-mouth, ascribed books, mass produced books, to newspapers, to telegraph, to radio, to TV, to the Internet...the dissemination of information has sped up exponentially. 

Information Speed Paper

From Gutenberg to the Internet

A History of Information Technology and Systems


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## pwowq (Aug 7, 2016)

RoseTylerFan said:


> According to Orion's Arm, in 1700.


Why 1700? Because of the start of a new social mindset? A mindset that had its true breakthru at about 1950-1970. If so, imho, information age had its breakthru at 2010-2015.


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## Millenium_01 (Mar 5, 2018)

pwowq said:


> Why 1700? Because of the start of a new social mindset? A mindset that had its true breakthru at about 1950-1970. If so, imho, information age had its breakthru at 2010-2015.


With smartphones and rapid innovation??


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## pwowq (Aug 7, 2016)

Millenium_01 said:


> With smartphones and rapid innovation??


When the "info" is at everyone's palm basically.

When even homeless beggars got smartphones? Hell yeah.


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## Millenium_01 (Mar 5, 2018)

pwowq said:


> When the "info" is at everyone's palm basically.
> 
> When even homeless beggars got smartphones? Hell yeah.


Uh... okay... 

Just curious; how would you split gen z (early,core,late)??


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## Blazkovitz (Mar 16, 2014)

pwowq said:


> Why 1700? Because of the start of a new social mindset? A mindset that had its true breakthru at about 1950-1970. If so, imho, information age had its breakthru at 2010-2015.


I would say the Industrial Age had its height around 1920s-1940s with huge totalitarian states (Germany and Russia) implementing massive industrial plans.

1960s and 1970s were the countercultural period, which saw _departure_ from certain Industrial Age ideals.


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## pwowq (Aug 7, 2016)

RoseTylerFan said:


> I would say the Industrial Age had its height around 1920s-1940s with huge totalitarian states (Germany and Russia) implementing massive industrial plans.
> 
> 1960s and 1970s were the countercultural period, which saw _departure_ from certain Industrial Age ideals.


I see it from an economic macro-behavioural mindset, not cultural. 1960-1970 the industrialisation of the world was BOOMING. What I really mean with "industrial mindset" is "consumerism".








But in recent years the focus has changed from "consuming goods" to "consuming information" in countries that have reached their consumption peaks. "Information" here being non-physical goods reached by key physical goods. 

The last increase in energy consumption is due to India and China being the last big players to reach peak consumerism (within next 10-20 years maybe).

Coming 20-30 years Africa will experience the same industrialisation.

We're at the beginning of the information-industrial shift.


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## Handsome Dyke (Oct 4, 2012)

U.S.-centric: I would put the boundary between the point when manufacturing began to be outsourced and computers became compact/realistic for use at home and in offices. So between mid 1970s to mid 1980s maybe. I don't know exactly when those things happened.


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## morgandollar (Feb 21, 2018)

I would say about 1995. That's when the Internet really hit critical mass, and also around the time our economy truly became global. It's also when emerging economics, in particular China, started to become important.


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