It's this.
What everyone is doing in this thread though is nitpicking about all the little things that annoy them in the current age. That's why "ages" are usually assigned after they've passed. People are too mired in the minutia of the time to really see it clearly. All these things that we think are defining characteristics of our time will barely be a blip on the radar in the face of the larger picture.
Precisely.
Ages are typically at least a century long, on average. They speak of the profound and civilization-shaping changes, and are thus essentially the "sum" of many little and big things that happened in that time.
We are still in the Information Age because we are still dealing with the implications of what it means to provide vast amounts of knowledge to a body of people who can hardly wrap their head around what "a vast amount of knowledge" even means to them.
During the Age of Enlightenment, there were plenty of people who refused to acknowledge the shifts in power and styles of thought that occurred during that time.
During the Age of Enlightenment, there were plenty of fools who refused to grab hold on to that freight train of knowledge and truth, for many reasons.
And throughout history, there has always been wrong information, even with the best intentions to provide accurate knowledge.
Ultimately, the definition of ages are not really about seeing the average IQ of the world's population change or anything... these implications mainly revolve around the way powers shift, grow, diminish, how civilizations adapt and move and become more advanced.
Much of that occurs even while the lowest common denominators are left struggling to add up how much currency is in their coin purse.
This age will last some time, and like all ages, it will have a vague boundary with the next age. There are still many reaches of the global civilization that have not been introduced to the progress of even the past few ages, such as the power of thought, truth, knowledge, and rather importantly, the power of Industry. This has eluded some.
My personal hunch is that history will mark the culmination of the Information Age with the spread of industry and global connectedness to even the furthest reaches of the world.
We have already seen what the power of both global communication and "all the world's information at your fingertips" can do for power struggles, control, and the eternal quest for freedom. And yet, the spread of global communications has not reached all.
The Age of Information will be marked more by the power struggles and the new demands for freedom by oppressed peoples, and less by the buffoons and manipulators.
Think of it: those who manipulate people with false information are not a new plague on our civilization. They have existed and worked their magic for eons. That they can more easily do their work, and that more gullible people can easily seek it out, is not something that will define the Information Age, just as it has never defined progress or regress at any prior point in time.
Facebook
Twitter