Revisiting the Early Discourse of the Information Age and Its Interplay with Humanity

Abstract

This paper examines scholars’ discourses on the coming of the Information Age. It starts by discussing scholars who measured the emergence of the Information Age in the early 1960s. Machlup and Galbraith used economic indicators, followed by the exploration of network and knowledge sharing, which is a crucial process in the formation of the Information Age. Ellul (1964) paralleled humanity with technology as a “system,” and Mumford (1966) coined the term “megamachine.” These early arguments were pessimistic that humans were considered as inevitably confined by uncontrolled structures due to information and its byproducts—technology. However, in the 1980s, Nora and Minc considered the Information Age optimistically by introducing the concept of “Decentralization” to indicate the freedom of “choices” for modern people.