Information Revolution Vs. Industrial Revolution - Locating Revolutions

The initial step in attempting to compare social epochs is to locate them historically and sketch a broad outline of what they entailed. At the most basic level, the Industrial Revolution calls to mind a succession of breakthrough inventions: the steam engine, the cotton gin, railroads, and so on. More broadly, the Industrial Revolution refers to an epoch that saw economic production shift from small-scale, relatively localized production based on individual skills and craftsmanship by artisans to large-scale, centralized production incorporating heavy, mechanized machinery and mass numbers of wage workers. In addition, the Industrial Revolution shifted the center of economic activity from agriculture to industry and manufacturing. Thus, the Industrial Revolution was marked by a series of sweeping social and economic transformations that upended existing paradigms.

As economies grew and became more integrated, the Industrial Revolution was generally marked by successive leading economic sectors. Viewed broadly, the Industrial Revolution can be broken into three major phases. The first phase, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, saw the development of textiles, coal, and iron into modern industries. The second occurred in the mid-19th century, with the opening of new territories to economic development and the overhauling of transportation via the large-scale implementation of railroad systems, aided by developments such as the steam engine. The third epoch came in the early 20th century, when the development of the mass-factory and industrial machinery transformed the industrial and social landscape. Through the first half of the 20th century, the economic center was dominated by science-based technologies, particularly those related to steel, chemicals, the internal combustion engine, and electricity, such as automotive technologies and petroleum-based industries.

While each of these epochs ushered in sweeping changes and innovations, they also produced profound social disruptions, as individuals and groups readjusted their places in society, often resulting in great upheaval. Relatedly, each of these phases was marked by booming economic growth followed by periods of sharp decline as these technologies and processes took root in society, as the social dislocations played themselves out, and as the growth opportunities inherent in the new technologies exhausted themselves.

Like the Industrial Revolution and most historical periods, the Information Revolution wasn't as abrupt a cataclysm as the name might suggest. Rather, what became known as the Information Revolution, although largely associated with the closing decades of the 20th century, had direct roots in the thick of the Industrial Age. The most direct forebears to the Information Revolution appeared around World War II in the 1940s. This period was marked by heavy government investment in new technologies, particularly those of use by the military for the war effort. Among these technologies were electronics and computers, which shortly after the war began to be applied more broadly in the business world. By the late 20th century, the leading economic sectors, particularly in the United States, were those involving electronics, computers, high technology, telecommunications, and related service sectors. In the process, these technologies ushered in the information economy, centered on knowledge-based industries.