I don’t advocate watching this whole video (regardless of what a smaller member of my household might say), but for about three minutes starting here: The World of Yesterday; it’s interesting to see a few ideas that have become ubiquitous in science fiction to the extent that they can be casually referenced in a rather innocuous children’s show.
Apart from the cyborg children, robot guards and time machine, what I’m interested in is the off-hand reference to the ‘information age’. Somehow from the perspective of the future, this seems to beg the question: was there less information in the past? is it just that access to the information was limited, and/or that the information was dispersed? is information manufactured (i.e., does this follow on from the ages of machines and technology?), or is it rather collected? what comes after the ‘information age’?
The manufacturing versus collecting, I think, is particularly pertinent to Hayles’ discussion of the nature of information–did the shopping habits of Tesco customers always exist as as unused information, or did the information only come into being when it was collected via clubcards? And was it always material in the form of the products individuals bought, or did it only take material form when recorded in a computer…or printed out for the marketing department?
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