The 21st century and late 20th century is often referred to as "The Information Age" because of the tremendous proliferation of information available to our generation. For a moment, contemplate the massive amount of knowledge which is at your fingertips from any web-enabled device. Literally almost every piece of human knowledge can be accessed within minutes from a web-enabled computer or smart phone. That's staggering.

Compare this with 500 years ago or even 50 years ago, when one's access to information was capped by their proximity to a collection of physical books. Now imagine life a few thousand years earlier before the printed word: information was capped by one's proximity to a physical human expert on the subject. In just the past few decades, and really only within the past few years, humans have gone from having relatively little access to information to almost infinite information. Anyone with a web browser can now access almost any piece of human knowledge. In fact, rather than too little information, the bigger problem in this era is too much information: how do we sort through the garbage from the truth.

While the information explosion is undoubtedly a dramatic change, I'd posit that the rise in new communication methods is an equally important development.

One hundred years ago, human communication was mostly centered on face-to-face verbal and non-verbal interaction, plus one-to-one written correspondence in the form of mailed letters. And smart, affluent people read books and circulars. Back then, over the course of your life you'd maybe speak with a few hundred people. 500 years before that, interactions were even more uncommon: maybe you'd communicate in person with a few dozen people in your village or within a 10 mile walking radius. A few thousand years ago, we hardly communicated with anyone outside of our family or clan -- maybe 10-20 people in your lifetime.

But think about the radical transformation of communication in the modern era. Thanks to phones, email, blogs, texting, microblogging, VOIP and social networks, not to mention advances in transportation, humans interact with tens of thousands of people in their lifetime. If you're active in online social communities, it's not unusual for that number to be even higher. I spend almost all of my day COMMUNICATING in one form or another: email, twitter, blogging, on the phone, doing media interviews, etc. When my 3 year old daughter asks what I do for a living, the answer is basically "I talk to people". Millions of people answer that question this way every day, compared with just priests and prophets 500 years ago. What a strange era we're in.

All of this brings me to a econo-political observation about the modern era. To be successful in the business or political worlds in the modern era, you have to be a terrific communicator across many different platforms: verbal one-on-one, verbal via TV, verbal via radio, written via email, written via texting or microblogging, written via blogs, verbal to large groups in person, etc. Gone are the days where a CEO could be successful if they were an erudite introvert, captaining the ship from a perch and surrounded by a coterie of advisors who carried out his edicts. Today's business and political leaders have to be masterful communicators to inspire and persuade people and institutions to see things their way, to do what they want, to act as they wish.

There is no better poster child for this phenomenon than President Obama. He is truly a gifted communicator: charming, telegenic, and empathetic. Even those who oppose his political views tend to grant him this compliment, and it is his very aptitude as a communicator which scares his opponents so much.

The people who rise to lead organizations, governments and institutions in the modern era will be those who master various communication platforms: the web in all its forms, TV and to a much lesser extent radio. What greater evidence do you need that the web is the world's greatest communication device, enabling one-to-many conversations than the fact that you and I have likely never met and yet you're reading these words right now.

To end on a lighter note, let me summarize with this. Rainn Wilson (the actor who plays Dwight Schrutte in The Office) has over 116K followers on Twitter and here's one of the alltime funniest tweets I've seen in which he proves my point. On 2/13, he wrote: "I have 16k followers. I type this... and 16k read it. Persimmon. Glory-hole. Cake. There. You all read those words. Sha-bam!"  [He wrote that 3 weeks ago and his "followers" have grown almost 10x since then]

Welcome to the Communication Era.