The Information Age - Human economic activity can be divided into three broad epochs:
- 1. The long period in which agricultural and other types of subsistence activities dominated
- 2. The period since the industrial revolution (ca. 1780) in which machines began to replace human labor
- 3. The “Information Age” in which human activities are increasingly dependent on the storage and flow of vast amounts of information.
Information Economics - Historically, we can say that economic activity is due to the effects of three factors:
- 1. Land
- 2. Labor (strategic preindustrial resource)
- 3. Capital (strategic resource of the industrial age)
- With the rise of information technologies, information must now be viewed as a fourth, strategically important economic factor.
- Information is used to determine how the other three factors are best allocated and has value in and of itself.
The Collapsing Information Lag - Electronic communications has greatly sped up the rate of transmission of information, beginning with the telegraph in the 1840s.
- Information that took days or weeks to be transmitted during the 1700s could be transmitted in minutes or hours by 1900.
- Today, telecommunications networks transmit huge quantities of information in a fraction of a second.
- In fact, the growth of telecommunications and especially computer networks has been the strongest contributor to the globalization phenomenon we are experiencing today.
A Brief History of Communications in North America North American Communications: A Brief History (see Figure 1-1) - 1837 Invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse
- 1876 Invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell
- 1892 Canadian Government starts regulating telephone system
- 1910 US Government begins to regulate telephone system
- 1915 Transcontinental and transatlantic phone service begins
- 1951 Direct-dialed long distance service begins
- 1962 Telstar satellite starts relaying international phone calls
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