overview

This profile supplies background to several guides by looking at past communications and information revolutions. 

Those revolutions are a reality check in considering claims made about the web or the information economy. They also suggest ways in which governments and other institutions adapt to new opportunities, new challenges. 

     in this profile

The following pages cover

telecoms - the shape and impact of the telegraph and telephony revolutions

print - books and newspapers

still image - prints, maps and photographs

film - the moving image

sound - sound recording

broadcast - radio and television

power - electricity networks as a metaphor for the web

railways - a world made by railways

highways - and by the automobile

impacts - studies of the economic and cultural impacts

bodies - communication bodies

metaphors- metaphors for the web

statistics - selected communication statistics

There's a separate and detailed profile on the evolution of the web and a timeline.

The Ketupa.net site provides over pages of information about Australian and overseas media groups. The Cinetext.net site offers a series of more detailed profiles on the film sector.

     the revolutionary experience 

While it's easy to succumb, like Negroponte (Being Digital) and Gilder (Life After Television), to a sort of digital delirium it is important to remember that law, government, economy and culture have experienced other revolutions. 

It is also useful to recognise that the ramifications of political and technological changes may be subtle.  

Revolutions begin with a blaze of fireworks (or dot coms) but quickly become bureaucratised - colonised by existing institutions, embraced by regulation - and assimilated into day to day lives. We've suggested in our profile on the web that such a 'normalisation' is occurring online at the moment.

The most powerful effect of the French Revolution may have been the diffusion of the Code Napoleon, ie the new legal framework, rather than blue-bloods having a nasty encounter with Madame Guillotine. Similarly, large-scale adoption of the typewriter and the bicycle prior to 1900 arguably had a greater economic and social impact (eg inclusion of women within an international white collar proletariat) than anything we'll seen from the Web during the next decade. 

     information 

As a result, we suggest that in considering the nature of the 'internet revolution' you avoid the dot com gurus and instead consult The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 00), an outstanding work by John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid. It's based on a real understanding of technologies and their impact on society and economy. 

For other thoughts on the adoption of new communication technologies and freedoms dip into Arenas of Innovation: Fringe Groups & the Discovery of New Liberties Of Action, a 2000 paper by Harmeet Sawhney & Seungwhan Lee, and Media Use in the Information Age: Emerging Patterns of Adoption & Consumer Use (Hillsdale: Erlbaum 89) edited by Jerry Salvaggio & Jennings Bryant.

Elsewhere in this site we've noted the incisive Information Rules (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 99) by Hal Varian & Carl Shapiro for its exploration of the 'new' and 'old' economies. It is essential reading.

A Nation Transformed By Information (New York: Oxford Uni Press 00) is an outstanding collection of essays, edited by Alfred Chandler and James Cortada, on the use and impact of information technologies. 

Another perspective is provided by the invaluable Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools & Research (Cambridge: MIT Press 00), edited by Erik Brynjolfsson & Brian Kahin, particularly the essays by Hal Varian and Paul David, and Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 98) by David Mowery & Nathan Rosenberg.



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