The information age is defined by two tectonic shifts. The first is the dawn of the information age itself – the shift from a manufacturing-based society to an information-based society. This is the story of the second half of the 20th century. America and the rest of the developed world evolved from economies where manufacturing of goods was uppermost to ones where manufacturing of information was.

The second shift is a stage within the information society itself. It is a shift from the centralized production and mass-market distibution of information to a decentralized model where literally billions of people have the means to produce and distribute content without large capital investments. This is the shift that is made possible, of course, by the introduction of powerful, affordable personal computers and the Internet. This is the tectonic shift that we are living through right now.

Pillars of the first information age are newspapers, books, academic journals, records, TV and Hollywood. Pillars of the second information age are individual academics, bloggers, software developers, programmers and entrepreneurs.

Elite American academic institutions had a hey-day during the first stage of the information age. The core model of these institutions as they came to full bloom in the 1950s was:

intellectually heterogenous/socially homogeneous

In retrospect we can now see that this model was perfectly aligned with the needs of  the first stage of the information society.  The reigning ideology of the elite universities, which stressed pure learning and the liberal arts experience over practical mastery, produced an elite cadre skilled at manipulating and articulating ideas in just the ways that were needed by the information society.

The intense clubbishness of the elite private institutions was also perfectly aligned with the first stage of the information society. Although the society required thinkers who were intellectually facile and skilled, at the same time it maintained social exclusivity in line with its tightly held control over modes of distribution of intellectual content. This is why so many boarding schools and elite college graduates ended up at the heads of newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, TV networks and Hollywood. They had just the social alignment that suited these institutions during their glory days.

It is very much an open question how the elite American educational institutions will fare as social exclusivity becomes less important in the new stage of the information society. Universities can continue to produce leaders for the centralized information community – the journals of record, Hollywood, TV and print journalism. But these will be a dwindling and less important part of the pie. Can they remain as relevant to more decentralized modes of intellectual production? The elite institutions seem to vaguely acknowledge this shift but it is not clear that they can surmount their legacy and remain as central to production of intellectual content as they once were. In the new information society we don’t need elitism. All we need are good thinkers.