Do we live in "The age of information"

[Madonna]

So, uh, guys, just wait two hundred years or so when our descendants can look back and have a better grasp on the scale of things we have done. They will do a better job of measuring when our contemporary age began and end (and what to call it). I am sure not too many people back in the day looked around and said, "Golly, having a lovely Silver Age here, but I cannot wait until we go Platinum!" It is silly to imagine you can objectively look at where you are when you are stuck in the midst of it.

If a person really wants an arbitrary "age" to live in, here are suggestions:

• Digital Age - Oh god, we have gone digital with everything, haven't we? Gone are all those clunky, analog things as we move into a higher plane of existence. We do not fall to robots; we become robots.
• Cyber Age - Two things, robot limbs and cybersex. Lots of statistics, probably misleading ones, say that loads of people now meet online. We just need that make out machine from The Big Bang show and we are gold.
• Cloud Age - Hard drives, shmard drives. When there is a problem, where do we go? To the cloud! Also, we can pretend it is also the Crowd Age, where we fund things as a group, and depend on Yahoo! Answers/Google*
• Platinum Age - Did you sign up and sign away your personal information to an ever-watching and ever-restless web of corporate spies, web crawlers, and data miners? Good, because we live in an age where people effectively own and profit off information on you. Le sad. Here, have a rewards card/stamp.

*No one cares about you, Bing.

[Mirage]

We are probably in the information age. It is thrown at us from every angle. We can access information about almost anything from almost anywhere. We can communicate with almost anyone from almost anywhere. We rely very heavily on lots of information to make our world and society more efficient. You could perhaps even say that information win or lose wars before soldiers have been deployed. Some of these things can be said about past eras too. I mean, they had spies for surveillance and information gathering and exchange before wars back then too, but today it is a few dozen orders of magnitude greater, so I don't think it's comparable.

Of course, our age could also be referred to as something entirely different in the future, such as the fossile fuel age, or the harvest way too many resources from our planet age. Who knows?

I think that the next "age" we'll enter will probably be something like the post scarcity age, or the never have diseases and old age-age. Unless we smurf up majorly and regress back to something lower tech.

[Dat Matt]

The industrial revolution was the age where we developed new processes such as steam engines and factories. As we are still in a constantly evolution, I would say we are in the electronic revolution. Look back 10 years and if you had a mobile phone then compare it to your current one. I had a Nokia 3310 handed down from my dad when I was 14. Comparing this to my Iphone 4 (i am nearly due an upgrade too). Worlds of difference, and things are only just going to improve. I look forward to seeing where technology is in 10 years time.

[Mirage]

whether we're using touch phones or 1995-tech computers to access information isn't very important in this context, I think. We'd all just be at the very beginning of the "age", and in the future, most people will probably not know the difference between now and 20 years ago when it comes to what tech we used.

also a blackberry is a smart phone. Touch isn't a requirement for a phone being classified as smart, even though it might seem that way today, with only one style of phones available in the mid-high end segment.

[Agent Proto]

Technology is just advancing at a more rapid pace now than it has been since the last known era. Despite that, most people still consider this current age the "Information Age." There isn't a better name, but I can guarantee it that the future will come up with a more appropriate name for this age when they look back to this.

[Niale]

You all have such great answers to these questions
Now that is some good information.

[Shlup]

I prefer to think of it as The Cat Gifs Age, but hopefully cat gifs will last forever so then it'd be moot.

[blackmage_nuke]

I'd say we were in an age of information if it werent for government censorship and coverups

[Rantz]

We're in the age of we don't know what our descendants will call it and it doesn't really matter anyway!

[Citizen Bleys]

I'm a visionary.

Future generations will call this the Age of Bulltrout.

[Madonna]

I'm a visionary.

Future generations will call this the Age of Bulltrout.

Bulltrout.

[Citizen Bleys]

What can I say? I'm a product of my generation.

[Hollycat]

We live in the age of apathy and escapism.

[Niale]

We live in the age of apathy and escapism.

Interesting

[Citizen Bleys]

We live in the age of apathy and escapism.

YOU might live there, but I live in Eorzea.