The Computer Age is over—or at least that's what George Gilder, the celebrated techno-pundit, proclaims in his new book, Telecosm : How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World.

Gilder’s claim is, in many aspects, true. But in this age of “Ages”—the Wireless Age, the Age of E-mail, the Age of Bandwidth—the lines of demarcation aren't always so clean. Ends bleed into new beginnings, and contraptions like the computer don’t disappear; they simply evolve.

For nearly a decade, technology industry prognosticators have been proclaiming the death of the personal computer. The PC is an arbitrary and stationary device, the argument goes, which doesn’t really suit the needs of most people. And as other consumer electronics increasingly offer many of the same functions which were once limited to the PC—we can now connect to the Internet though our Palm Pilots, we can keep our calendar and contact information on our cell phones, and we can send e-mail through devices we clip to our belts—the desktop computer becomes less and less dominant as our primary networked device.

The argument makes sense—outside of the workplace, our focus is clearly moving away from the cumbersome PCs that sit on our desks to the burgeoning high-speed network which connects a growing number of new devices. But we must bear in mind that most of these “next-generation” networked devices are direct descendents of the personal computer. They all share the same DNA—a basic configuration of software working with hardware to execute a set of functions. If one believes that this basic configuration is, in fact, at the heart of the Computer Age, then—given this hereditary continuity—it is hard to determine where one age ends and another begins.

Gilder is right in his assessment of the fundamental shift which was identified years ago by Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, who cryptically asserted that “the Network is the Computer.” In fact, according to Sun’s corporate literature, we are already in the midst of the Network Age. Not surprisingly, cell phone giant Nokia believes we are in the Wireless Age, a sentiment which is shared by numerous other providers of wireless devices and services.

With all this prophesizing and commotion, it would be nice to have a tidy definition for our current age. Unfortunately, though, it’s difficult to impose clear lines of division. One age does not always exclude all others.

Our mealy-mouthed, but practical solution is to refer to this as the “Information Age.” We prefer the term’s inclusiveness and, frankly, its ambiguous breadth. We’ll leave it to future historians to decide when, exactly, one age ended and another began. For now, we’re all guessing. We think even George Gilder wouldn’t dispute that.

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