Nasdaq's Nineties: The Information Society

In the early 1990's, the stock market started to pick up and increase at unseen rates. Everyone and their brother saw this and wanted a piece of the easy money. People were investing and in the mid 90's, the New York Stock Exchange was growing at an unseen pace. Publicly traded companies were increasing their capital by almost one fourth of their whole income per year. Public companies and of course their CEO's were receiving more free money than they knew what to do with. This boom was to set up one of the worst bust's of the stock market in our generation, though

Today’s society has an affinity for even fledgling technological advances. If you take a look around, almost everyone has the new iPhone or Galaxy cell phone. Each new, updated device supplants the last. The incessant use of internet is brought on by the fact that it changes how we complete almost every task.

Although Americans had experienced economic growth before World War II, it had never been at such a grand scale. More and more Americans were entering into what was considered as the country’s middle class at the time (annual income between $3,000 and $10,000 per year). In fact, the number of middle-class Americans had doubled since the late 1920s and included about 60 percent of the total American population. As the standard of living in America increased progressively, consumerism exploded. Companies developed new and innovative products in order to keep up with the growing consumer demand. The adults participated in the consumer economy with their new-fangled credit cards and charge accounts to purchase these material goods. Manufactures also marketed their products to the relatively affluent children. These children bought toys and records, participating in the consumer craze. A 1958 story in Life magazine, whose headline read “4,000,000 a Year Make Millions in Business”, declared that kids were a “built-in recession

This report will examine how changes in technology are affected by society, in turn, how the society that produced this technology is impacted by this creation. The paper will specifically address the impact of personal computers, cell phones, and the internet on society, and how these technological advancements relate to the three major sociological perspectives; equilibrium model, digital divide, and cultural lag.

Large companies and businesses began to take over the roles the smaller businesses played, and prosperity wasn’t equally distributed. By 1929, the banks controlled most of America’s financial resources, and it was estimated that 40% of American’s lived in poverty. However, earlier in the decade, in 1921, over 1.5 million American’s had some form of shares in stocks. America also saw the introduction of new technology, with things like cars, electric fridges, toasters, and vacuums.

In the early 1900’s the stock prices were bringing the attention of many citizens around the world. However they didn’t know they were going to lose all of their money and some even their property. Between the years 1929 to 1939 an incident known in history as “The Great Depression” occurred. It was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world (“The Great Depression”). The Great depression had a significant impact on the American economy, society, and politics, and had a hard recovery process.

It cannot be denied that the internet has changed the way the world operates. Products that we never thought possible have become the norm; connecting across the globe is nearly seamless; and, as Bill Gates stated in his speech at COMDEX in 1990, information is truly at our fingertips.These things are good. They help businesses and people operate at higher speeds and efficiencies, but we often stop here, not considering the impacts of these changes beyond their immediate good. The purpose of this paper is to point out some ways that the internet has failed us, or rather how we, as a society, are failingas a result of community digitization.

For many years America was the lone superpower in the world after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990’s. During this same decade, America saw the internet revolution and a surplus in the budget for the first time in a long time. This meant that the economy was surging, and a lot of internet companies saw their stocks rising rapidly and their shareholders also sharing in the profits. This all came to a quick end in the 1990’s with the “dot.com” bubble popping resulting in a downturn at the end of the decade. This compiled with the events of 9/11 a few short years later created a large amount of instability throughout the economy of the country, with this uncertainty looming it only took a few more years for the housing market to collapse due to oversaturation of the housing market. Then finally in October of 2008, the auto industry took a nose dive along with a banking crisis shortly

There is no doubt that we are currently living through a revolution in information technology. When we consider that an entire generation of young people in the early 21st century now mediates social existence through text-based messaging sent remotely and wirelessly, it is hard to imagine a parallel could we consider an entire generation creating that much textual material by passing notes written on paper with pencils? But the biggest mystery about the information revolution is why it should have taken until the 21st century to happen, when more or less every element of this revolution was already understood in the 19th century. The simple fact would appear to be that technological developments are frequently held back by the overall intellectual paradigm in which they were developed. I hope to demonstrate that although the key technological elements of wireless text messaging were all understood over a hundred years ago, it was the paradigms whereby those technologies were developed which held back the further democratization of text messages or e-mail.

What investors and officials believed to be the storm in entitreity was merely a false alarm, the catalyst for what would follow less than a decade later. Between April 1997 and June 2003, the Dot.com bubble was witnessed, where a series of investors contributed to technology services and internet start up companies in anticipation of a success which was not entirely delivered. (WWW.businessinsider.com) After the bubble had burst, the American and global economy appeared like it would endure a period of stability under the speculation of many senior economist, following 2001 however, the housing market and the American dream became the ‘New thing’ with a backdrop of securitization bonds and CDO’s. (USA Journal)

The decades following the Second World War, often referred as the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” brought an immeasurable amount of prosperity to the United States economy. Real GDP per capita grew at 2.25 percent per year, along with a large number of American citizens entering the middle class with the ability to enjoy benefits from rising wages and home ownership (Palley 1). It seemed as though there would be no end to this post-war economic boom; however, the “Golden Age of Capitalism” would abruptly end at the onset of the seventies with a variety of factors contributing to economic downturn.

It is difficult to meet a single person who has not used the some kind of technological device within the past 24 hours. The internet, an international network of networks, is one of the many day-to-day technologies that people use. We rely upon the internet for a number of things. From looking up answers to tricky trivia questions to communicating with our friends and family members, there is no

Outside of the classroom and the office, technology is still omnipresent. The internet, like most advancements and perhaps the best known example of modern technology, began at a military level (“Information Technology” 2) and wound up eventually landing in the laps of businesses and the common person. With this, the normal way of conducting business changed dramatically. Instead of physically exchanging money, it is now possible to use a website like PayPal to make transactions (Friedman 84). This transaction can occur from a computer, smart-phone, or some other electronic device, possible because an extraordinary amount of people, especially young adults, now carry them around constantly (Champy 1). It may have been inevitable, but it is still staggering to see how much these advancing technologies has become commonplace.

Internet has not always been such a key figure in American life; in fact it was

A new generation is forming the way its members will be written into history books. These are the members of the digital culture, a lifestyle relying on the use of technology and the Internet as a tool of communication and information-sharing. Nevertheless, as with the generations of the past, some individuals are not participating in this new cultural experience. It is common knowledge that some citizens do not use the Internet. Many do not use the Internet simply due to economic or social restrictions that prevent them from easily accessing the technology. However, what is not as common is why some members of our society are even choosing not to use the Internet. “Access, Civic