The Information Age

The Information Age, also called the Digital Age or the Computer Age, is the historical period, generally dated from the second half of the twentieth century onward, marked by a rapid shift from industrial manufacturing as the economy's central activity toward the production, processing and distribution of information through computing and digital communication technology. Its foundations lie in the development of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit in the late 1950s, which made increasingly powerful and affordable computing possible, followed by the personal computer's spread into homes and offices from the late 1970s and 1980s onward and the subsequent rise of the internet and World Wide Web in the 1990s. The period is associated with sweeping changes across the global economy, communication and daily life, including e-commerce, social media and mobile computing, and its arrival is often treated by historians and economists as a transition of comparable scale to the earlier Industrial Revolution.