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The Rotunda
Friday, July 4, 2025

The Information Age is Really Nothing All That Special

The Information Age has bloomed, taking video under house arrest after its decades-old murder of the radio star and producing social media — seemingly out of thin air — through which we can talk to our friends in another state or down the hall. Miracle of miracles, it has even reduced the entirety of the Elvis corpus to a couple zip files and delivered the movie star du jour on a silver platter called Netflix.

However, the Information Age is not the end of time. It is another phase no different from the first crank of the printing press or the last few clicks of the typewriter. Despite accusations that the whirling waters of Google have made us learn differently, and perhaps worse, human beings remain human.

The rare futurist questions how long this will be true with the rise of moveable prosthetics. However, there is something to being human and acting as humans do, a thing the eggheads call “culture” that defies simplicity.

A good deal of what I’m coming to think about the Information Age was shaped during a few hours talking with an old roommate. He’s a traditional guy, taught that a gentleman should have a wallet, handkerchief and comb on his person at all times. He hates Facebook, but who can blame him? The recent flood of property rights that measure on many a popular site has taken all the fun out of posting videos and incites paranoia from the idea that Zuckerberg can sell your interests. Like a lot of people, he thinks that private life has become too public. To the contrary, I think public life has been made more private during the Information Age.

How has public life become more private and what does it have to do with the computerized society? Well, it didn’t start with widespread computer use. Rather, computer use fit into a mold built for the 20th century. Following the austerity of the Victorian Age and the shock of the First World War, we started to change our institutions. Things that were based on the public exchange of goods became centered on private emotion. The display of emotion became more encouraged in the public sphere and the issue of personal identity, rather than status symbol, became an integral part of clothing. This revolution of the feels is what has shaped the Information Age, bringing it closer and closer to the public, sometimes global, display of private considerations. An angry tweet is not, or at least often is not, a cry for help. It is the common method of the day: the instinct to show 

the world what we think. Many people will cite differences between the face-to-face volatility and free love of the 60s and the YouTube bigotry and adult posts of today. The only difference I see is that the vast majority has grown more accustomed to global spleen venting online rather than doing so in the limited real world. This doesn’t mean that the common information-ager will not spew expletives in a crazed manner. It just means that the Internet is more appropriate for them. Cue the cancer of cyber bullying. Likewise, it’s easier to text or message “hello” than to call or meet up. It’s easier to learn dances from the web than another human being.

Computers do more, despite popular belief, than cater to our likes and dislikes. Computers have taken over the responsibilities of banking from the large accounting tomes. The recording of assets and debt, on which the capitalist system rests, swings in the hammock of a database somewhere.

But the record books and their systems of debt in their turn did something we always did. Debt is not only what is owed. When records are applied to the way in which debt is incurred and paid, it becomes credit. Credit shows how well an individual can handle financial obligations, and in the end is a way of enforced bartering. You trade me your ability to produce money for my ability to pay it back. When we’re done with this, I’ll look you up from a nice string of cowries.

In addition to all that computers continue about the human tradition, there is a persistent fear that electronics dilute the experience and make us less able to communicate. Some say that we are slowly becoming more integrated and that soon, a smart phone will charge from your beating heart. I draw a line between what humans do and what they are. People are not on the web; they are using it. People, though they may identify themselves as bricklayers or lawyers, are as often fishermen and golfers. The computer is a tool, a tool with immense power and perspective changing qualities, but it can still be set down or, as some predict, surgically removed.

Another friend, a graduate student in the English department, lamented that he was not alive at the time to see Woodstock. And the truth is that though mass collections of musicians and music fans may gather at a rustic spot again, it will never be the same. We are not so much different as we do things differently. The Information Age will have its Woodstock and we’ll be part of the celebration. Who knows, it may have even already happened.

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