Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1978

I am constantly amazed at how recently most of the events that now determine the shape of human communication have happened. I feel almost ashamed to be talking about such recent technology here in the 5,000-year shadow of China, where Ts'ai Lun is supposed to have invented fibre paper in 105 A.D., and where a university with 30,000 students was functioning a century before that. But the development of communication has foreshortened time. From language to writing took tens o f thousands of years. From writing to printing took some thousands of years. From printing to the first electronic media took hundreds of years. And from the first electronic medium until live television from the moon was only a few decades. A man my age today could have heard the first scheduled radio broadcasts, taken part in one of the first television hookups, seen the first tape recorder developed, used one of the first Xerox machines, tried his hand at the first photocompositor, heard the beep-beep beep-beep of the first satellite, and helped build the first large computer. I know, because I did all those things. All those happened in one man's life time. And suppose we were to take two men's life- times- - multiply my present age by two. That would include everything that we call the electronic and pictorial media: from the invention of photography that for the first time gave man a visual memory; the invention of the telegraph that was our first real step beyond the signal fires that announced the fall of Troy; the telephone that for the first time extended man's own voice beyond shouting distance; the movies, and all the electronic media; and those three remarkable years of 1945, 1946, and 1947 in the shadow of which we are living and probably shall continue to live for the rest of this century. Do these dates mean something to you? In 1945 ， in a modest four-page article in the British Wireless World Arthur Clarke set forth the design and potential of communication satellites. . . . explaining that this was something that might happen in perhaps 50 years - about 1995. But, as we all know, the first satellite was flying in 1957 - 12 years, not 50. In 1946 ， John Von Neumann in one of the notable papers of our times set down the theory and design of electronic computers. 1947: three physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, invented the transistor. This made it possible to miniaturize electronics. It made powerful satellites possible. It made small computers feasible. Something very large has been happening in the world around us. It is so large that even those of us who are especially concerned with communication and with current history have had trouble seeing it. The result is that we find ourselves, almost to our own surprise, in the first decades of an era which observers are beginning to call an Age of Information. Let us explore this idea. An Age of Information What would be the signs of an Age of Informa tion? For one thing, there would be a change in the distribution of the work force. Fritz Machlup, the Princeton economist who handles numbers very con servatively, estimates that between 40 and 50 per cent of the total work force in the United States are now engaged in producing, collecting, or disseminating information, or supporting those activities. He is inclined to think that the Knowledge Industry is now, or soon will, be the second largest industry in the world— the largest being agriculture. Another sign would be a change in investment patterns, Machlup, in 1962, estimated that about 15 per cent of the U.S. national income was going into information services. He means the mass media, education, telephone and telegraph, postal service, libraries, telecommunications, advertising, research and development, and so forth. Still another sign would be a change in the flow of the information. It should be coming faster and more of it. It isn't hard for any of us in a university to believe that those things are true. I felt that I had to see 42 scholarly journals regularly, when I was at a place where I could get them, and if I had kept up with all the new scholarship of importance to me I should have found myself reading 24 hours a day. This is familiar to all of us. What we may need to remind ourselves is how much faster and how much more. How Much Faster Up until the middle of the 19th century distant messages could travel only as fast as transportation. But then it became possible to separate com­ munication from transportation. Messages could 33