Information Age in the context of Computer History Museum

In politics (and particularly in international politics), soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power). It involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change. In 2012, Joseph Nye of Harvard University explained that with soft power, "the best propaganda is not propaganda", further explaining that during the Information Age, "credibility is the scarcest resource".

Nye popularised the term in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power.

The digital divide is unequal access to and effective use of digital technology, encompassing four interrelated dimensions: motivational, material, skills, and usage access.

The digital divide worsens inequality around access to information and resources. In the Information Age, people without access to the Internet and other technology are at a disadvantage, for they are less able to connect with others, find and apply for jobs, shop, and learn.

Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996. Most millennials are the children of baby boomers and older Gen Xers, and are often the parents of Generation Alpha.

As children in the late 1980s to 2000s, millennials saw the rise of the Information Age and Internet, being described by some as the first global generation. As adolescents and young adults in the late 1990s to 2010s, the generation was marked by a more upbeat youth culture, elevated familiarity with the Internet and technology in general, and usage of early social media platforms such as AOL Instant Messenger, LiveJournal, and Myspace. Between the 1990s and 2010s, people from developing countries became increasingly well-educated, a factor that boosted economic growth in these countries.

The New Yorker is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for The New York Times. Together with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, they established the F-R Publishing Company and set up the magazine's first office in Manhattan. Ross remained the editor until his death in 1951, shaping the magazine's editorial tone and standards, such as its robust fact-checking operation, for which The New Yorker is widely recognized.

Although its reviews and events listings often focused on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker gained a reputation for publishing serious essays, long-form journalism, well-regarded fiction, and humor for a national and international audience, including work by writers such as Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alice Munro. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the magazine adapted to the digital era, maintaining its traditional print operations while expanding its online presence, including making its archives available on the Internet and introducing a digital version of the magazine. David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998. Since 2004, The New Yorker has published endorsements in U.S. presidential elections.

George Boole (/buːl/ BOOL; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was an English autodidact, mathematician, philosopher and logician who served as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854), which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic, essential to computer programming, is credited with helping to lay the foundations for the Information Age.

Boole was the son of a shoemaker. He received a primary school education and learned Latin and modern languages through various means. At 16, he began teaching to support his family. He established his own school at 19 and later ran a boarding school in Lincoln. Boole was an active member of local societies and collaborated with fellow mathematicians. In 1849, he was appointed the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork (now University College Cork) in Ireland, where he met his future wife, Mary Everest. He continued his involvement in social causes and maintained connections with Lincoln. In 1864, Boole died due to fever-induced pleural effusion after developing pneumonia.

An information society is a society or subculture where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid growth of a variety of forms of information. Proponents of this theory posit that these technologies are impacting most important forms of social organization, including education, economy, health, government, warfare, and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens, defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.

Some of the markers of this steady change may be technological, economic, occupational, spatial, cultural, or a combination of all of these.Information society is seen as a successor to industrial society. Closely related concepts are the post-industrial society (post-fordism), post-modern society, computer society and knowledge society, telematic society, society of the spectacle (postmodernism), Information Revolution and Information Age, network society (Manuel Castells) or even liquid modernity.

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of the Information Age.

Shannon was the first to describe the use of Boolean algebra—essential to all digital electronic circuits—and helped found the field of artificial intelligence. Roboticist Rodney Brooks declared Shannon the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies, and mathematician Solomon W. Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century".

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by mathematician Claude Shannon published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. It was renamed The Mathematical Theory of Communication in the 1949 book of the same name, a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work. It has tens of thousands of citations, being one of the most influential and cited scientific papers of all time, as it gave rise to the field of information theory, with Scientific American referring to the paper as the "Magna Carta of the Information Age", while the electrical engineer Robert G. Gallager called the paper a "blueprint for the digital era". Historian James Gleick rated the paper as the most important development of 1948, placing the transistor second in the same time period, with Gleick emphasizing that the paper by Shannon was "even more profound and more fundamental" than the transistor.

It is also noted that "as did relativity and quantum theory, information theory radically changed the way scientists look at the universe". The paper also formally introduced the term "bit" and serves as its theoretical foundation.

A post-industrial economy is a period of growth within an industrialized economy or nation in which the relative importance of manufacturing reduces and that of services, information, and research grows.

Such economies are often marked by a declining manufacturing sector, resulting in de-industrialization, and a large service sector as well as an increase in the amount of information technology, often leading to an "Information Age"; information, knowledge, and creativity are the new raw materials of such an economy. The industry aspect of a post-industrial economy is sent into less developed nations which manufacture what is needed at lower costs through outsourcing. This occurrence is typical of nations that industrialized in the past such as the United Kingdom (first industrialised nation), most of Western Europe and the United States.

Conspiracy theories -- (i.e. explanations for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy, generally by powerful sinister groups, often political in motivation), but always when other explanations are more probable -- are a prevalent feature of Arab politics, according to a number of sources. A 1994 paper in the journal Political Psychology by Prof. Matthew Gray writes they "are a common and popular phenomenon" that are important to understanding the political landscape of the Arab world. Variants include conspiracies involving Islamic anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, the machinations of Western colonialism, superpowers, oil, and the war on terror, which is often referred to in Arab media as a "War against Islam". Roger Cohen theorizes that the popularity of conspiracy theories in the Arab world is "the ultimate refuge of the powerless". The prevalence of conspiracy theories reflects effective top-down dissemination of disinformation by state actors, rather than a unique susceptibility of Arab culture to conspiracy, as some have claimed. State hostility and weak protections for journalists present major obstacles to challenging conspiracy theories, as journalists struggle to gather information and put their lives at risk by contradicting their governments. The spread of antisemitic and anti-Zionist conspiracism in the Arab world and the Middle East has seen an extraordinary proliferation since the beginning of the Internet Era.

Gray points out that actual conspiracies such as the 1956 plot to seize control of the Suez Canal encourage speculation and creation of imagined conspiracies. After the 1967 Six-Day War which resulted in a decisive Arab defeat, conspiracy theories started to gain traction in the Arab world. The war was perceived as a conspiracy by Israel and the United States—or its opposite: a Soviet plot to bring Egypt into the Soviet sphere of influence. Thomas Friedman notes the numerous conspiracy theories concerning the Lebanese civil war, attributing the source of the conflict to "Israelis, the Syrians, the Americans, the Soviets, or Henry Kissinger" in an attempt to destabilize the Lebanese government.

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is a speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984), published by Susan Allison. These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.

After expanding on the story in Neuromancer with two more novels (Count Zero in 1986 and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988), thus completing the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre known as steampunk. In the 1990s, Gibson composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of near-future urban environments, postindustrial society, and late capitalism.

Intellectual capital is the result of mental processes that form a set of intangible objects that can be used in economic activity and bring income to its owner (organization), covering the competencies of its people (human capital), the value relating to its relationships (relational capital), and everything that is left when the employees go home (structural capital), of which intellectual property (IP) is but one component. It is the sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge. The term is used in academia in an attempt to account for the value of intangible assets not listed explicitly on a company's balance sheets. On a national level, intellectual capital refers to national intangible capital (NIC).

A second meaning that is used in academia and was adopted in large corporations is focused on the recycling of knowledge via knowledge management and intellectual capital management (ICM). Creating, shaping and updating the stock of intellectual capital requires the formulation of a strategic vision, which blends together all three dimensions of intellectual capital within the organisational context through exploration, exploitation, measurement, and disclosure. Intellectual capital is used in assessing the wealth of organizations. A metric for the value of intellectual capital is the amount by which the enterprise value of a firm exceeds the value of its tangible (physical and financial) assets. Directly visible on corporate books is capital embodied in its physical assets and financial capital; however all three make up the value of an enterprise. Measuring the real value and the total performance of intellectual capital's components is a critical part of running a company in the knowledge economy and Information Age. Understanding the intellectual capital in an enterprise allows leveraging of its intellectual assets. For a corporation, the result will optimize its stock price.

A pawnbroker is an individual who offers secured loans to people by taking items of personal property as collateral. A pawnbrokering entity is called a pawnshop or pawnbrokerage. While many items can be pawned, pawnshops typically accept jewelry, musical instruments, coins, gold, silver and firearms. Home-audio equipment, computers, video-game systems, televisions, cameras, and power tools became pawnable as the world entered the Information Age. The items pawned to the broker or shop are themselves called pledges, pawns, or simply the collateral.

If an item is pawned for a loan (colloquially "hocked" or "popped" or "up the spout"),within a certain contractual period of time the pawner may redeem it for the amount of the loan plus some agreed-upon amount for interest. In the United States the amount of time and the rate of interest are governed by law and by state commerce-department policies. Pawnbrokers have the same license as a bank, which is highly regulated. If the loan is not paid (or extended, if applicable) within the time period, the pawnbroker will offer the pawned item for sale to other customers. Unlike other lenders, the pawnbroker does not report the defaulted loan on the customer's credit-report, since the pawnbroker has physical possession of the item and may recoup the loan value through outright sale of the item. Pawnbrokers may also sell items that have been sold outright to them by customers. Some pawnshops are willing to trade items in their shop for items brought to them by customers.

The Industrial Age is a period of history that encompasses the changes in economic and social organization that began around 1760 in Great Britain and later in other countries, characterized chiefly by the replacement of hand tools with power-driven machines such as the power loom and the steam engine, and by the concentration of industry in large establishments.

While it is commonly believed that the Industrial Age was supplanted by the Information Age in the late 20th century, a view that has become common since the Revolutions of 1989, much of the Third World economy is still based on manufacturing, although mobile phones are now commonplace even in the poorest of countries, enabling access to global information networks. Even though many developing countries remain largely industrial, the Information Age is increasingly on the ground.

The term digital native describes a person who has grown up in the Information Age. The term "digital native" was coined by Marc Prensky, an American writer, speaker and technologist who wrote several articles referencing this subject. This term specifically applied to the generation that grew up in the "digital age", predominantly regarding individuals born from 1980 onwards, namely Millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha. Individuals from these demographic cohorts can quickly and comfortably locate, consume and send digital information through electronic devices and platforms such as computers, mobile phones, and social media.

Digital natives are distinguished from digital immigrants, people who grew up in a world dominated by print and television, because they were born before the advent of the Internet. The digital generation grew up with increased confidence in the technology that they were encircled and engulfed in. This was thanks in part to their predecessors growing interest into a subject that was previously an unknown. Due to their upbringing, this digital generation of youth became fixated on their technologies as it became an ingrained, integral and essential way of life. Prensky concluded that due to the volume of daily interactions with technology, the digital native generation had developed a completely different way of thinking. Though the brains may not have changed physically, pathways and thinking patterns had evolved, and brains had changed to be physiologically different than those of the bygone era. Repeated exposure had helped grow and stimulate certain regions of the brain, while other unused parts of the brain were reduced in size.