Some time in the future, the Information Age may be viewed as just another part of the Industrial Revolution. But to us living today, it looks different. We can afford to be a bit arbitrary, so let’s say the Information Age began in the year 2001.
What are some things that are different about our lives today from that we lived, say, fifty years ago? Once again, we can be arbitrary and compare 1960 America to 2010 America.
Note that the number of changes between 1960 America and 2010 America are almost as numerous and lifestyle-shaking as all the changes between the Agricultural Age and the early Industrial Age. We’ve come a long way, baby!
Here are some big differences.
Top of the list has to be cell phone usage. How ubiquitous this has become! This ability to talk anywhere, any time, to anyone is a huge change in how humans socialize. What is interesting to watch is the balance between talking and texting. When do people talk, when do people text, what determines the choice of method?
The Internet is the twin to cell phone usage. Now printed media have lost one of their big commodity uses, and there are the social networking surprises as well.
Writing took away a lot of the value of old people’s memories, pocket calculators take away a lot of the value of learning arithmetic. Likewise computers and data communication are dramatically changing what it is useful for people to learn. They are also dramatically changing human entertainment.
The world is not a mostly big and distant place any more. We benefit from trusting strangers even more than before. And we are developing a global language, English.
What can be done with health care has increased dramatically. In 1951 penicillin was the only “miracle drug” widely available. In 1963 the first popular ultrasound scanner was developed. How far we have come since.
Almost every child born becomes an adult.
This one has Mother Nature raising her eyebrows. No other species attempts this, no other species even tries to come close. This concept is not common among species because so much of life is about experimenting, about researching how to do things better. You can’t have significant and steady advancement without lots of failures.
And life on Earth is life in a world filled with calamities. Redundancy is Mother Nature’s most common insurance policy.
However, civilized humans have done a whole lot to reduce calamities, so this One Child = One Adult thinking makes sense in modern conditions … but it sure is different!
If the Industrial Age was characterized by change with each generation, the Information Age is characterized by change with each decade.
All this change makes adaptive thinking more and more important. But the instinctive thinking we have available to us hasn’t gone away. Instinctive thinking is still comfortable and quick thinking, so it is constantly looking for its chance to be relevant.
Let’s talk about some cases where instinctive thinking becomes relevant in modern times … or, at least, it thinks it does.