Basically : All those “ages” are phantoms. They’re there because you’re looking too closely. If you look at history you’ll see “the ages” become shorter and shorter. That’s because historic records become denser and denser. Since most people seem to be able to span 10 years with their cognitive abilities, give or take 9 years, a large number of people will notice stuff that has changed in the last couple of decades.

Obviously, because we all think we are important, much more important than people who died [a href=http://encyclopediadramatica.com/At_least_100]at least 100[/a] years ago. So we attribute more value to what we’ve done.

That said, while perspective is important, there’s an awful lot of humans nowadays, it’s a success story the world has never seen before from any species that we know off.

There’s also so many developments going on at this timescale that might have a significant influence on the future as well, such as progress in medicine, energy and more (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies) that it’s pretty damn difficult to choose which will be the defining trait of our century, while it has only just begun.

So I’m left to wonder what the significance of any age really is. For our day to day lives, things feel very different, but the impact on our species seems to be slightly dissapointing. We’re not more connected. If anything, we’ve never been more a-social.