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Election results: Good-bye, Industrial Age. Hello, Information Age.

After the recent presidential elections, I read and watched as many analysis of the meaning of the results of those elections as I could. One of the analyses that caught my attention was a column written by Shelly Palmer (www.shellypalmer.com), because he focused on technology, not politics.

Palmer is the hosts of radio and television shows and a business development consultant based in New York. He sees the reelection of President Barack Obama as one of the key moments in the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

According to Palmer, the global technological connectivity, where more and more devices and people are connected to more and more devices and people all over the world, is a trend that “will never reverse.”

In his opinion, the recent presidential elections could be seen as an indication that the majority of the voters in the United States are in favor of some national policies promoting technology as key factor in education, innovation, energy, cybersecurity, and other issues.

According to Palmer, we should all celebrate the fact that this lengthy transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is being accomplished  in the context of a peaceful and democratic transition that began in 1796 when then President George Washington declined a third term in office, leading to the election of John Adams as the second president of the country.

Palmer seems to say that, in the same way that the election of some presidents more than centuries ago favored the transition of the United States into the Industrial Age, the election in 2012 of a certain candidate would speed up the irreversible transition of the United States into the Information Age.

Due to the limits of this column, we will not analyze the details of the arguments presented by Palmer. We will only say that -leaving all politics aside- it should be clear an era is ending and a new era is beginning.

This does not mean that everything related to the past will soon disappear and it does not mean that everything in the future will be good and better. There is always an overlapping of historic eras and transitions from one era to another are not always easy to detect. Things from the past will remain and some things from the future will be rejected.

If we assume, as Palmer does, that the Industrial Age -that began more than 250 years ago- is now ending and that we are now in the Information Age (something impossible to deny), then we should analyze some of the changes the Industrial Age caused to anticipate what kind of changes the Information Age will cause to people and institutions.

Obviously, many experts have analyzed that topic countless times for the past several decades. However, I think our growing familiarity with technology and the fact we take technology for granted hinder our efforts to think about the transition from one age to a new one. Regardless, the Information Age is here to stay.

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