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Information and communication technologies

Key terms

• Human-computer symbiosis A concept proposed by J. C. R. Licklider, envisioning a close partnership between human users and computational systems that augments cognition, creativity, and collaboration.
• Information and communication technologies (ICTs) The broad array of tools and systems - past and present - that enable the recording, manipulation, and transmission of information.
• Interactive computing A mode of human-computer engagement in which users can input commands and receive immediate feedback, enabling dynamic use of digital systems. This contrasts with earlier batch processing.
• Punch cards A data storage and input medium in which holes punched in cards represent information.
• Technological determinism The belief that technology is the primary driver of social and cultural change, often at the expense of recognizing human agency, institutional structures, and cultural context.
• Time-binding and space-binding A pair of terms drawn from Harold Innis. The first refers to communication technologies that preserve information over long durations; the second to media that facilitate communication across vast distances, enabling coordination and control over large geographical areas.
• Turing machine A theoretical construct proposed by Alan Turing to model the basic logic of computation.
• Vertical filing An innovation in document management introduced in the nineteenth century, enabling documents to be stored upright in standardized folders for easier access and organization.

Introduction

Data and information are more than just the technologies through which we encounter them. Still, understanding those technologies matters - they shape how we interpret information and influence how we engage with it.

To avoid presentism - the tendency to view current developments as unprecedented - it helps to situate these technologies historically. Many of the challenges we face today have deeper roots than we often realize. This chapter traces key trajectories in the development of information and communication technologies, offering context for understanding recent shifts within a broader historical landscape.

Technology and change

When you think of information or data, what comes to mind? These concepts often appear to us through artifacts - machines and records. As a result, we tend to assign significant power to the technologies that process information, particularly digital computers.

But this perspective has its limits. Imagine touring a city renowned for its architecture - say, Barcelona - and focusing solely on the tools used to construct its buildings. You might overlook how these structures integrate with their surroundings, the creative genius of their designers, the ways they shape daily life, or how they embody power and ideology. There is nothing wrong, of course, with appreciating the craftsmanship. It is fascinating that Antoni Gaudí designed the Sagrada Família by suspending chains from the ceiling to model catenary arches.1 This method - and the technologies that followed - are crucial to understanding architecture. But to reduce a city solely to its buildings would ignore the broader social, cultural, and economic forces that shape the social environment.

Similarly, we must avoid assuming that information and communication technologies alone created the information age - a fallacy known as technological determinism. At the same time, we should also recognize that technologies structure possibility: they do not dictate outcomes, but they do shape the terrain of what can be imagined and enacted.

Most tourists in Paris head straight to the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. But on a recent visit, while crowds clustered around Manet's paintings at the Musée d'Orsay, I wandered the quieter Musée des Arts et Métiers, examining their remarkable collection of inventions. There, on display, were three devices central to this story: a Jacquard loom, several Pascalines, and a signal tower from Claude Chappe's optical telegraph.

Architecture leaves behind enduring monuments, even as the tools that created them often disappear. The pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica remain, but the techniques used to build them are still debated - and sometimes mythologized. With information systems, the inverse is often true: the tools endure, while the data they processed, and the systems they supported, vanish.

The Jacquard loom, the Pascaline, and the optical telegraph symbolize three long-standing threads in the history of information technologies: the recording of information, the manipulation of data, and communication across networks. These strands have intersected and evolved over millennia. But the mid twentieth century marked a profound acceleration - with the advent of cybernetics, interactive computing, and the rise of a global digital network.

Writing on stone and sand

Reading and writing are so embedded in our daily lives that we rarely think of them as technologies.2 Yet they are - developed, refined, and deployed across centuries to record and transmit information. Some of the earliest human records are symbolic or representative images carved and painted on cave walls. Without contemporary context, it is extraordinarily difficult to know how these records were used. In the Sonoran Desert not far from my home, there are spiral petroglyphs that date back as far as the eighth century , and the best we can do is guess at their meaning. Some have considered rock art as a kind of proto-writing, though the line between art and recorded speech can be difficult to distinguish.3

Ways in which we record information are heavily determined by the culture and environment in which writing emerges. So, the use of different shapes of clay tokens throughout Mesopotamia, shaped to represent items for trade, reflected the material available - clay to form the tokens and reeds to mark them. But the use of tokens of various shapes also demonstrates the degree to which this proto-writing likely reflects both the resources and the culture: one in which keeping track of goods and being able to trade them without exchanging the physical item is important.4 Contrast this with the more rounded glyphs that developed using palm-leaf in parts of southeast Asia - a requirement to avoid tearing the material.

Both suggest cultures that value traveling with one's data. These early tokens appear to have been kept in envelopes and could be easily moved in the way that the grain, livestock, or land they represented could not. This was likewise true of the khipu, knotted string necklaces worn in the Andes over more than a millennium and used to keep and transmit administrative records.5 These recording technologies carried information over distances, extending the reach of power and exchange. A Canadian economist, Harold Innis, wrote of such systems as space-binding, as they effectively allowed a message to travel beyond the "voice of a Stentor," as Aristotle put it.6

The choice of clay was due to its wide availability, but because it would dry quickly, the writing style also had to be quick. This was useful for an empire of exchange that required common forms of communication over broad areas. Innis noted that some empires were time-binding and that by writing in stone, people could have their messages last well beyond their deaths. The Code of Hammurabi survives largely because it is carved into a 4,000-year-old basalt stele that today sits in the Louvre in Paris. That it remained in Susa - in modern Iraq - for all but the last 100 of those years is testament to the difficulty in traveling over large distances with a 2-meter-tall stone monument: not very space-binding, but carving laws literally in stone led to a time-binding, far outlasting the author and his empire.

Use of documents in ancient Mesopotamia feels strangely familiar. Any visit to the British Museum will find people gathered around the Rosetta Stone, but there will be a smaller number of people upstairs, gathering around a glass case for a glimpse of a small clay tablet imprinted with Akkadian cuneiform that is "internet famous." It is a complaint letter, sent to a trader named Ea-na?ir by his customer, Nanni. Nanni complains about the quality of the copper he was sold, and the rudeness with which his servant had been treated during the transaction. It feels like a prosaic and relatable problem, handled in the way we might send a similar emailed complaint today.

The story of writing represents developments in literacy, but also in the material nature of record-keeping. A great deal of ink has been spilled charting the ties between Gutenberg's movable type press and the Enlightenment with its seismic shift in knowledge, culture, and power. We will revisit some of these claims in a later chapter. Movable type, despite all the attention, is perhaps even more influential than it is given credit for, and the same can be said of the steam press centuries later.

But many familiar document technologies get short shrift. The idea that ways of storing documents ever needed to be invented seems strange. Nonetheless, particularly when governing complex organizations or societies, keeping...