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1. Agricultural Civilization

The first era of human civilization emerged due to the rise of agriculture, which is “the first turning point in human social development” (Toffler, 1980, p. 29). Leaving behind the hardships of nomadic life, human beings began the journey of civilization by settling down in fixed locations as soon as they knew how to gather seeds from plants and grew them periodically. In an agricultural community, farming was more economical and less labor-intensive than hunting, fishing, or searching for fruit in the wild. The development of farming provided people with fixed meals each day for the first time in history. The new lifestyle enabled people to live longer and healthier lives, and be less vulnerable to nature, especially when it turned harsh.

Once families started to produce more food than all the members could consume, people could then have time and opportunities to develop specialized knowledge, instead of producing food. When information can be communicated to others in written form, it can also be transmitted to future generations. The amount of knowledge then increased greatly in society, which supported philosophers, mathematicians, artists, and tool inventors, etc., resulting in widespread social changes.

The invention of tools had become one of the driving forces of the agrarian economy. If one single technology can be named in playing a key role in the new economy, it is the invention of the plough, though some may argue, reasonably, that other tools, such as the sickle or flail, were also essential innovations. In this sense, farming served as a source of motivation for tool invention. Equipped with the new tools, people could cultivate more land and harvest more food. A broad social use of the plough and other tools, along with some social factors, led human beings to the threshold of a new civilization era — the era of industrial civilization, which was sparked by the Industrial Revolution, starting in the late eighteenth century.

2. Industrial Civilization

The industrial civilization may be better known as the Industrial Revolution, which had changed almost every aspect of human society at the time, largely because of the advances in the technologies of industry. Multiple technological innovations at that time had liberated human beings by diminishing physical labor with mechanical work, supporting the injection of capitalist practices and principles into what had been an agrarian society. Human beings thus entered into the era of industrial civilization, the product of the Industrial Revolution.

The preindustrial era, marking the beginning of capitalism, started in 1440, thanks to two new technologies — navigation technology, resulting in geographic discoveries, and Gutenberg’s invention of printing technology. The latter, in a sense, was even more far-reaching that other technologies at the time. The broad social access to the printing press made it possible for more people to read and write in Europe, where printed books and manuscripts became less expensive and commonly accessible. Cumulatively, Europe witnessed a record high literacy rate, eventually contributing to the full blossom of the Renaissance. Broad social access to steam machines, another new technology at that time, terminated the preindustrial era in 1760, and marked the beginning of the industrial civilization era.

The Chinese, for instance, had invented and developed movable type printing technology much earlier than Gutenberg. Four hundred years later, Gutenberg repeated, perhaps independently, the Chinese invention and added new values to the technology, making printing more mechanically efficient (Calder, 1962). However, what Gutenberg had contributed was broad social access to books, first in Europe and later in the rest of the world. Watt’s invention was not new either, but he added automatic control of rotary speed, a big improvement, to older steam machines that were unstable, unreliable, and unsafe. Again, Watt’s contribution resulted in broad social access to the safe and reliable use of steam power, which would not easily explode like before. Mass media, both print and broadcast, in this era grew more powerful. The set of systematic changes to human society eventually amounted to a new era of civilization — information civilization, which is highly significant as a global civilization, integrating all parts of the globe into a single unit for the first time.

3. Information Civilization

Since the 1960s, we are living in times of an information revolution that is leading us into a new civilization era, which is dramatically different from the preceding era of industrial civilization. If the Industrial Revolution had significantly replaced physical labor with mechanical work, the information revolution brings about the dematerialization of work: automation, computerization, and robotization relieving humans from heavy or tedious work (Wierzbicki, 2007).

This new epoch is the era of information civilization, in which information plays a more essential role than industrial products. The main feature of the era is its high information intensity of all activities. It is generally accepted that 1980 marked the beginning of the information civilization era due to the improvement of personal computers (PC), network technology, and new protocols of computer networks (2007). The broad civil use of information technology, especially internet technologies, started with the definition of seven ISO/OSI and TCP/IP protocols in the 1980s, which by chance paralleled the development of the first personal computers (Wierzbicki & Nakamori, 2005). Broad access to PCs, network technology, and other information technology laid the ground for the development of social media.

In this era, information has become the fundamental productive resource, sometimes more important than raw materials or energy in the industrial economy. In the preindustrial and the industrial eras, the dominant medium for recording human heritage was printed books. Informational technology will soon make possible the fully multimedia recording of the human heritage; in other words, instead of a book, we will have electronic records including films, music, interactive exercises, and virtual environments. This change will have impacts exceeding that of Gutenberg’s printing technology. Like the rise of information civilization, a new era with distinct features follows, irresistibly, by the end of the second millennium. This is called the era of internet civilization, which is becoming the mainframe of the newly established networked society.

4. Internet Civilization

At the dawn of the third millennium, networked society, characterized by a broad use of network technology and information and communication technology, has fully risen on a global scale (Castells, 2010), marking the beginning of the internet civilization era. “Networks are becoming the nervous system of the society,” having more influence on the entire society and personal lives than the road system for transportation of people and goods (Dijk, 2012, p.2). The social use of ICT has made wide-ranging connectivity possible, including broadband, the cloud, and mobile technology. When people are brought closer like never before, their joint effort not only redefines boundaries of geopolitical entities, but also makes significant economic, social, and environmental progress.

The hallmark of internet civilization is the broad social use of information and communication technology that provides innovative ways for people to collaborate, share, and get informed. By incorporating ICT into their lives, individuals have changed the ways they collaborate, innovate, and interact with each other. Knowledge in this era plays an even more important role than information (Wierzbicki, 2007). Another hallmark of the new era is unprecedented wide-ranging connectivity. In the internet civilization era, everyone and everything will be connected everywhere in real time. Media networks, social networks, and economic networks reach into the farthest corners of the world on a global scale (Dijk, 2012). In many respects, connectivity serves as the starting point for social developments, which creates freedom, empowerment, and opportunity to transform the world into a network society. While individuals and communities empowered by connectivity are driving fundamental social change, connectivity opens up new hope and opportunities for finding solutions to the toughest challenges in the world.

The era of internet civilization started in 2010, the year Apple Inc. launched its first iPad, representing another revolutionary media device following smartphones that bring people closer to information and to each other. The technology of the era makes it easy for people to create various networks in which they can easily exchange knowledge, capital, and cultural communication, in addition to creating and sharing information.

The networks, or simply nets, enable new modes of informational flow. Those who control the information flow are in charge of the nets, and thus have enormous power to control anyone who relies on the flow of information. As individuals are increasingly networked, rather than embedded into hierarchical groups, a networked individualism emerges, guiding how people connect, communicate, and exchange information, and, more importantly, providing opportunities, constraints, rules, and procedures. For the first time in history, technology offers seemingly unlimited possibilities of previously unavailable products and services than ever before (Wierzbicki, 2007).

The internet civilization era also requires people to develop new skills and strategies for collaborating, innovating, and problem-resolving. Meanwhile, a rising number of high-tech companies and businesses are fundamentally dependent on knowledge, with the capability of analyzing and making the best use of data. Other knowledge creators, in academia and in small firms, are also fundamentally dependent on knowledge.