Editing Information Age (section)

==Information in social and economic activities==

The main feature of the information revolution is the growing economic, social and technological role of information.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Krishnapuram|first=Raghu|title=2013 1st International Conference on Emerging Trends and Applications in Computer Science |chapter=Global trends in information technology and their implication |date=September 2013|pages=v|publisher=IEEE|doi=10.1109/icetacs.2013.6691382|isbn=978-1-4673-5250-5}}</ref> Information-related activities did not come up with the Information Revolution. They existed, in one form or the other, in all human societies, and eventually developed into institutions, such as the [[Platonic Academy]], [[Aristotle]]'s Peripatetic school in the [[Lyceum]], the [[Musaeum]] and the [[Library of Alexandria]], or the schools of [[Babylonian astronomy]]. The [[British Agricultural Revolution|Agricultural Revolution]] and the [[Industrial Revolution]] came up when new informational inputs were produced by individual innovators, or by scientific and technical institutions. During the Information Revolution all these activities are experiencing continuous growth, while other information-oriented activities are emerging.

Information is the central theme of several new sciences, which emerged in the 1940s, including [[Claude E. Shannon|Shannon]]'s (1949) ''[[Information Theory]]''<ref name=Shannon/> and [[Norbert Wiener|Wiener]]'s (1948) ''[[Cybernetics]]''. Wiener stated: "information is information not matter or energy". This aphorism suggests that information should be considered along with [[matter]] and energy as the third constituent part of the Universe; information is carried by matter or by energy.<ref name=Wiener/> By the 1990s some writers believed that changes implied by the Information revolution will lead to not only a fiscal crisis for governments but also the disintegration of all "large structures".<ref name="tsin">{{cite book |author1=William Rees-Mogg |author2=James Dale Davidson |author1-link=William Rees-Mogg |author2-link=James Dale Davidson |title=The Sovereign Individual |date=1997 |publisher=[[Simon & Schuster]] |isbn=978-0684832722 |page=[https://archive.org/details/sovereignindivid00jame/page/7 7] |url=https://archive.org/details/sovereignindivid00jame/mode/2up |language=en}}</ref>