Digital Age

The Digital Age

The Digital Age also known as the Computer Age, Information Age, or New Media Age, is a period in human history characterized by the shift from traditional industry that the industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information computerization. The onset of the Digital Age is associated with the Digital Revolution, just as the Industrial Revolution marked the onset of the Industrial Age.

During the Digital age, the phenomenon is that the digital industry creates a knowledge-based society surrounded by a high-tech global economy that spans over its influence on how the manufacturing throughput and the service sector operate in an efficient and convenient way. In a commercialized society, the information industry is able to allow individuals to explore their personalized needs, therefore simplifying the procedure of making decisions for transactions and significantly lowering costs for both the producers and buyers. This is accepted overwhelmingly by participants throughout the entire economic activities for efficacy purposes, and new economic incentives would then be indigenously encouraged, such as the knowledge economy.

The Digital Age formed by capitalizing on the computer microminiaturization advances, with a transition spanning from the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s, to the Internet's reaching a critical mass in the early 1990s, and the adoption of such technology by the public in the two decades after 1990. This evolution of technology in daily life, as well as of educational life style, the Information Age has allowed rapid global communications and networking to shape modern society.

The Internet was conceived as a fail-proof network that could connect computers together and be resistant to any single point of failure. It is said that the Internet cannot be totally destroyed in one event, and if large areas are disabled, the information is easily rerouted. It was created mainly by DARPA on work carried out by British scientists like Donald Davies; its initial software applications were e-mail and computer file transfer.

Though the Internet itself has existed since 1969, it was with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989-1990 by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and its introduction in 1991 that the Internet became an easily accessible network. Today the Internet is a global platform for accelerating the flow of information and is pushing many, if not most, older forms of media into obsolescence.

Information storage

The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 optimally compressed exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 optimally compressed exabytes in 2007. This is the informational equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 539 MB per person, roughly 4 CD-ROM per person of 1993, 12 CD-ROM per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CD-ROM per person in 2007.