The human web and the domestication of the networked computer

Abstract

While information and communication is crucial for the survival of species, little is known about the way that humans have used (and abused) information and communication systems throughout human existence. It is our firm belief that the rise of the network society, the information society, the information age has firm roots in previous ages. However most of these accounts go back to, at most the industrial revolution. We adopt an information and communications systems lens to look at the history of mankind from a big history perspective using Spier’s [10]) regime transformations to analyse how information and communication systems interacted with human development historically. The main questions we address are: What was the role of Information and Communication Systems in past regime transformations and what can we learn from that for the present and fourth regime transformation (of the domestication of the networked computer) we are going through? How have these communication infrastructures and information ecologies evolved and what can the past show us about the role of these developments in the near future?