Information, Please: If You are Still Worried About How to Find Your Place in the ... Age of Information‪.‬

ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN is senior features writer for The Globe and Mail. "THE transition from an industrial age to a post-industrial or information age has been discussed so much and for so long that we may not have noticed that we are passing into a post-information age," writes media maven Nicholas Negroponte, in his 1995 book Being Digital. These are disquieting words for anyone confused by the ramifications of being alive during the Age of Information. Could it be that the party is already over, before many of us have figured out who was really invited? Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling seems to prod at the same idea, in an essay in a new collection of writings edited by Montreal theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker: "We live in the Information Age, but now the pace of innovation is so savage that individual human beings can leave history behind. This `age' stuff comes pretty cheap to us nowadays. We postmodern types can burn out an age in ten years."