Life in the information age

Life in the information age

Over the past 50 years, computers have changed dramatically, for the better.  They used to be humongous and take up a whole room without a monitor. Nowadays you can get a computer that’s as thick as a notepad.  This evolution has dramatically changed the way people work inside the office, it has made jobs a lot easier and it has freed a lot of space that used to be taken up by paper and other accessories.

Below is an example of a timeline that the world has evolved around, it is a very simple but good example that shows just the simple landmarks in the world that we live in today.

Source: clemson.edu

What would life be like if we did have no information? It wouldn’t be functioning, in this day and age information is transferred from computer to computer, computer to person, person to computer, person to person; there are lots of different variations of information transferring. Information is also like a currency, because if we know something that someone else doesn’t know then we have power and we can sell that information.

If we look at a typical working office, you can see the developments throughout technology. For example if we look at a 1960’s office you would expect to find type writers and lots of filing cabinets, then as we move onto 1970 we start to get electric typewriters introduced to the office scene. Then when 1980 came alone, most offices would have a computer by then which would include a big CRT monitor and would be running MS-DOS, you would also have the bonus of a computer mouse!

Then along came the 1990s, most offices still had fairly big CRT monitors, but you can also see that they had filing cabinets still but also photocopies and printers dashed around the room.

Throughout all of these changes, working styles have changed for the better, it has become much much easier and quicker for people to get jobs done in their workplace, with the evolution of computers for ever updating and big manufacturers bringing out new ones every year, things can only get better!  Especially nowadays we have smart phones, which can do much much more than what a computer used to be able to do. We have all that information packed into a little device. We can access social networks where ever we are in the world, create and reply to emails when ever we wish, this has obviously had a massive impact on the way people work, making it a lot easier but maybe a bit more stressful for them, especially getting to grips with all this new technology.

Overall I think the way technology has revolutionised and developed has created a basic work ethic for the modern society today, for the better of course.  Over the next few years new technology is bound to come out and make jobs even more easier for us.