Information Age Yet Future

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" height=35 BGCOLOR="#000099" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <div> <B>Information Age Yet Future</B></div> <div>                                                   </div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=445 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> <div> "<B>For the historian the great boom of the 1850s marks the foundation of a global industrial economy and a single world history</B>" (Eric Hobsbawn, <I>The Age of Capital 1848-1875</I>, (London: Cardinal, 1988), p.88).</div> <bR> <div> "By the outbreak of the First World War the great powers of Europe had either achieved an industrial revolution or had taken significant strides in the direction of industrialization. In 1870 there had been only five industrialized or serious industrializing countries, four in Europe (the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and Germany) and one outside Europe (the United States). These five countries are estimated to have accounted for over four-fifths of the world's output of manufactures in 1870. By 1913 their share had fallen to under three quarters..." (W.A Cole and Phyllis Dean, <I>The Growth of National Incomes</I>, "The Cambridge Economic History of Europe", Vol.6, Pt.1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p.25).</div> <bR> <div> The 1890s has been chosen as the beginning of the Industrial Age or Industrial Society. This is some 110 years after the big bang of the industrial revolution when the James Watt and Matthew Boulton rotary-motion steam engine was first used to power spinning machinery in a factory. (The Watt engine was some 80 years after the invention of the Newcomen atmospheric steam engine).</div> <bR> <div> The contention is that the Great Depression of the Nineteenth Century (1870s-1890s) was the birth-pangs of the Industrial Age so that the Great Depression of the early Twenty-first Century is the labour pains of the Information Age.</div> <bR> <div> One of the reasons for identifying a society is the identifying work-occupation of that society:</div> <bR> <div> "It is well-established generalization that as a community develops economically the number of its workers engaged in agriculture tends to decline, at first relatively to those engaged in manufacturing or the provision of services, and later absolutely as more and more of its resources are devoted to the production of industrial goods. As average income rises above subsistence levels a smaller proportion is required to buy the staple foods and a correspondingly larger proportion becomes available to purchase manufactured products to support a developing network of commercial, social and governmental institutions and buy professional services. Thus a familiar, if imprecise, indicator of the stage of economic development reached by a country and the level of real incomes enjoyed by its citizens is the proportion of its labour force tied to agricultural occupations..." (Cole and Dean, p.45).</div> <bR> <div> "In the United States about 73 per cent of the gainfully occupied population was in agriculture at the beginning of the nineteenth century: by 1850 the proportion was 64 per cent and by 1870 53 per cent. Thereafter the decline gathered momentum - to 43 per cent in 1890 and 31 per cent in 1910. The decline in absolute numbers engaged in agriculture seems to have begun during the first World War. By 1940 the proportion had dropped to 17 per cent and in absolute terms the numbers engaged in agricultural occupations had fallen back to the levels of the 1880s..." (Cole and Dean, p.46).</div> <bR> <div> The work-transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age is the pattern for the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age:</div> <bR> <div> <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="verdana" >"The first industrial revolution turned the factory into the central production organisation and the main creator of wealth. Factory workers became the first new social class since the appearance of knights in armour more than 1,000 years earlier</FONT>... <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="verdana" >Within two or three decades, knowledge technologists will become the dominant group in the workforce in all developed countries, occupying the same position that unionised factory workers held at the peak of their power in the 1950s and 60s" (</FONT>Peter Drucker, <I>A survey of the new future</I>, The Economist, November 3, 2001,<FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="verdana" > pp.20, 9).</FONT></div> <bR> <div> The first phase of the industrial revolution was based on the manufacture of cotton. But it was the railways, the  second phase of the 'first' industrial revolution that laid the foundation for the Industrial Age or Society.</div> <bR> <div> "The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s, immediately had an enormous impact on the West's imagination, but it did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829, and of pre-paid postal service and of the telegraph in the decade thereafter. Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s, the information revolution's equivalent of the steam engine, stimulated people's imagination, but it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes" (Drucker, p.20).</div> <bR> <div> "Personal computers are only a secondary step in the evolution of computer technology that began with the first commercial mainframe computer (the UNIVAC 1 in 1951)" Robert J. Gordon, <I>Does the "New Economy" Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past</I>, May 1, 2000, p.31, http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon).</div> <bR> <div> The UNIVAC 1, a vacuum-tube electronic digital computer maybe rhymed with Watt's steam engine and the IBM personal computer of 1981, rhymed with Stephenson's Rocket and the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway of 1830.</div> <bR> <div> The electric-telegraph of the second phase of the 'first' industrial revolution has a parallel with the internet. The telegraph has been referred to as the Victorian Internet. (Compare the parallel of laying transcontinental railways and telegraph cables, post American Civil War with the fibre optic cabling, post Cold War).</div> <bR> <div> [In 1844 the first public telegraph message was sent between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Md. The Morse telegraph system became the standard telegraph technique. The <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="verdana" >William Cooke-Charles Wheatstone telegraph, patented in 1837, therefore, has a rhyme with the </FONT> Steve Jobs-Steve Wozniak Apple II integrated-circuit personal computer of 1977].</div> <bR> <div> In a chart above the boom years of cheap capital of 1850-1873 is rhymed with the boom years of 1995-2000, (or alternative 1991-2000 - periods after the defeat of the spectre of communism - 1848 and 1989).</div> <bR> <div> Eric Hobsbawn, above, referred to the boom years after 1850s-70s as the "foundation of a global industrial economy", which in this booklet is rhymed with the 1990s as the 'foundation of a global information society.'</div> <bR> <div> Peter Brain pointed out that:</div> <bR> <div> "[The American] lead in per-capita GDP was not closed until the 1980s... When many countries began to catch up, the United States responded with an awesome transformation of its industrial base - and again left its competitors in its wake..." (Peter Brain, <I>Beyond Meltdown</I>: <I>The Global Battle for Sustained Growth</I>, (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999), p.2-3).</div> <bR> <div> The personal computer and internet revolution, the foundation for the new society, has a worrying parallel with Britain:</div> <bR> <div> "The 1840s remained ... a decade of crisis, even in terms of classical economics. British industry was still dominated by textiles, and the market for them was both finite and subject to <B>increasing competition from American and Europe</B>. The industry was overcapitalized, and the adoption of each new invention meant that the return on capital decreased; each commercial depression was steeper and longer lasting than the last" (Kenneth O. Morgan, editor, "The Oxford History of Britain", Revised Edition, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999) p.505).</div> <bR> <div> "<B>Britain saved herself, and so the world, by expanding out of crisis through the explosion of railway technology, by creating, and then exporting, the matrix of heavy industry based on coal and steel. The United States and Germany became great industrial powers</B>. Other countries - France, Belgium, Austria, even Russia and Japan - began to follow. The modern economy took shape in the middle decades of the century, and for a time it seemed possible that his shape would be essentially English, with London as the financial pivot, and unrestricted free trade, by treaty or unilateral action, as <B>the dynamic of unlimited self-sustaining growth</B>. The world was going England's way: hence <B>the almost crazy optimism of the 1850s and 1860s</B>" (Paul Johnson, <I>The Offshore Islanders</I>, (London: Orion Books,  1992, p.327).</div> <bR> <div> But then came the stockmarket crashes in America and Europe in 1873 and the world 'great' depression.  This marked a turning point for Britain.</div> <bR> <div> "The slowdown in British productivity and the decrease in competitiveness in the late nineteenth century has been one of the most investigated issued in economic history. It involved such complex issues as national character, generational differences, the social ethos, and the educational system as well as more specific economic reasons like low investment, out-of-date plant, bad labour relations, poor salesmanship, and the rest. For the student of grand strategy, concerned with the <I>relative</I> picture, these explanations are less important than the fact that the country as a whole was steadily losing ground. <B>Whereas in 1880 the United Kingdom still contained 22.9 per cent of total world manufacturing output, that figure shrunk to 13.6 per cent by 1913; and while its share of world trade was 23.2 per cent in 1880, it was only 14.1 per cent in 1911-13.</B> In terms of industrial muscle, both the United States and Imperial Germany had moved ahead. The 'workshop of the world' was now in third place, not because it wasn't growing, but because others were growing faster" (Paul Kennedy, <I>The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers</I>, (London: Fontana Press, 1989), p.294).</div> <bR> <div> Note: While the railways, steamships and electric telegraph laid the foundation for the Industrial Age it was the 'great' inventions of the second industrial Revolution (1860-1900) - electricity, internal combustion engine, petroleum, natural gas, telephone, phonograph, popular phonography, radio, motion pictures, indoor plumbing etc, (see Gordon, <I>Does the "New Economy"</I>, pp.21-23), that were the defining inventions of industrial society. A new set of inventions to define the information age?</div> <bR> <div> Carly Fiorina, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard<FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Verdana" > "sees no end to the digital revolution, and predicts huge consequences for business and beyond":</FONT></div> <bR> <div> "A funny thing happened on the way to 2005: the digital revolution actually became real...</div> <bR> <div> "<B>It's a revolution in any sense of the word</B>. <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="verdana" ><B>But I have another name for it: a warm-up act</B></FONT>. <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#FF0000" FACE="verdana" ><B>We are entering an era where everything is going digital</B></FONT>. It's going to be the main event of our lives for decades to come.</div> <bR> <div> "Just think about the changes taking place with photography today...  photography is increasingly not only digital but also mobile, virtual and personal: mobile because you can do your digital photoworks anywhere at any time; virtual in that others can enjoy it without being there with you; and it's personal in that you can edit the digital image and use it in any way you want.</div> <bR> <div> "Every process, in every industry - from banking to academia and from medicine to international security - is beginning to follow that same pattern. It's empowering, but also a bit scary, because it's a leap into the unknown. Nobody knows for sure how to equip themselves. Anybody who says they do is lying.</div> <bR> <div> "We've already seen glimpses of the kinds of changes this transformation will bring. For starters, it's completely changing the nature of authority. There used to be a time when access to information was the root of all power. The digital age is bringing about the democratisation of information, the removal of traditional barriers of time, distance and wealth, and the onset of total transparency...</div> <bR> <div> "It's changing business models... And it will change democracy...</div> <bR> <div> "For those of us who are expected to deliver tangible results in this changing world ... where do we start? First, in 2005 the demand for simplicity will grow... For digital to become fully accepted by consumers and businesses, it must be intuitive and easier to use...</div> <bR> <div> "Second, value increasingly will be created horizontally, not vertically...</div> <bR> <div> "Third, consumers and businesses will be less willing to compromise. As technology moves from the fringe to the core of people's lives and businesses, the need for technology to deliver more becomes important. The days of compromise are gone. Customers and consumers want it all: affordability, reliability, security, simplicity, manageability, adaptability, innovation, connection.</div> <bR> <div> "Getting there is going to require the right blend of realism and optimism. We need to be realistic that none of this is going to be easy. But we also need to be optimistic, because if we get this right, digital technology will make more things more possible for more people in more places than at any time in history. That alone is worth the journey" (<I>Totally digital</I>, The Economist, The World in 2005, p.115).</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <A HREF="id86_m.htm" TITLE="Information Age Yet Future">Top of Page</A>         <A HREF="id53_manufacturing_and_trade.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="News, Current Events and the Future">News and Current Events Page</A>          <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Future Watch">Home Page</A></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>