“Information Age” or the “Empowerment Age”?
Posted : August 16, 2004 at 11:41 am [America/Los_Angeles]
[via The Empowerment Age]
…
The book (The Revolution will not be televised - Joe Trippi) is a veritable love sonnet to the Internet, to the power of
people to organize online and lend their voice, expertise, and energy
to not just political campaigns, but also to corporate America (such as
Roy Disney’s netroots-fueled spanking of Michael Eisner), and as
powerful marketing tools for campaigns gutsy enough to entrust their
futures to the unwashed masses.Trippi calls it the “Empowerment Age” (rather than the “Information
Age”), which is so catchy I’m stealing it. What good is information if
we don’t act on it? And technology has given us an unprecedented level
of access to the decision-making levers of any organization or company.The question isn’t whether the tools work — we’ve seen them work
(heck, half the book is dedicated to showing how the Dean campaign was
built through the netroots) — but who will take advantage of
them.
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I think it’s fair to say that it started off as “Information Age”. I still remember how pundits would go at lengths to explain the difference between “data” and “information” and how
Computers and the Internet were laying the foundation of the “Information Age”.
Having said that, I think IT geeks knew all along that Computers along with the Internet (especially the World Wide Web) had far more promise than the obvious dot-coms of late 1990s would have us beleive. I think it would be fair to say that it took the emergence of blogs and Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds to signal the end of “Information Age” or “Information Consumption Age” as we know it and the start of what Joe quite rightly calls the “Empowerment Age”.
With 10 GHz microprocessors and virtually unlimited bandwidth (wired or wirelessly) at your fingertips (cellphone, smartphone, PDA, tablet PCs or good-old desktops in your home/office) coming our way in not so distant future, the historians of the so-called “Empowerment Age” have this friendly warning:
You ain’t seen nothing yet!
- Anand
Category: IT and Business Trends