Digital Age: Digital Technology

Digital Technology

• Overview:  The convergence of telecommunications and computing technologies/ services to a new medium offering integrated services through digital networks was predicted in the 1970s and is beginning to have major social and commercial impacts in the 1990s. The motivation for an "information highway" was expressed in 1937, just prior to the advent of computer technology, when H. G. Wells was promoting the concept of a "world brain" based on a "permanent world encyclopedia" as a social good through giving universal access to all of human knowledge.

Telecommunications and computing technologies (information technology) have common roots in electronics device technology, both exploiting it to provide systems and services in similar ways. Information technology is characterized by high rates of growth in performance parameters sustained over long periods. For example, the number of computers connected through the Internet is growing at 100% a year and has grown by 7 orders of magnitude in 27 years. 

The history of computing shows the emergence of major new industries concerned with activities that depend upon, and support, the basic circuit development but which are qualitatively different in their conceptual frameworks and applications impacts from that development; for example, programming has led to a software industry, human-computer interaction has led to an interactive applications industry, document representation has led to a desktop publishing industry, and so on.

Each of these emergent areas of computing has had its own learning curve and the growth of information systems technology overall may be seen as the cumulative impact of a tiered succession of learning curves, each triggered by advances at lower levels and each supporting further advances at lower levels and the eventual triggering of new advances at higher levels. Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence.

The technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. H. G. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies.

More...............................  Convergence to the Information Highway