The Information Revolution and the Dawn of the Information Age

The advent of the movable type printing press in 14th Century Europe spelled the beginning of a major cultural revolution and the dawning of the Renaissance. The availability of books to read lead to fresh perspectives and new accounting, that was the birth of science, capitalism, modern art and architecture and the exploration of the world.

With the advent of the PC and global internet services, we have been in the midst of a new kind of revolution, that of the electronic information age. Conventional textual storage and printing operations have been rendered fairly obsolete as the primary means of information transmission and storage. We do not now know the full implications or possibilities of this new age, but it is happening upon the dawn of the Third Millennium. Many spin-off technologies have yet to be discovered or invented from the possibilities presented to us by this breakthrough in digital information storage and processing.

One of the yet untapped possibilities of this information revolution is that control and manipulation of mass information, upon which modern nation states have used as a means for mobilizing and controlling their constituency, is being rapidly and effectively undermined by the free, immediate access to information on the web. Censorship and propaganda upon which modern totalitarian states have depended for the manipulation and control of the masses, is being rendered obsolete--an anachronism of a frequently brutal 20th Century. At the same time, individual people, given instant access to the entire globe, have the potential for making their own voices heard. The social consequences of this new information revolution may prove to be greater than the technological inventions that will be forthcoming from it as well.

The information revolution promises new foundations for social exchange and integration and moderation of worldview on a level heretofore impossible. For the first time means are directly placed in the hands of people who can act privately, as individuals, in a potential forum and network that is worldwide in scope. People have the means now for voting directly on issues and for making their own voices heard around the world. Under such conditions, totalitarian and represssive governments, even secret agencies in otherwise democratic nations, are finding manipulation and control of the truth to be more difficult than ever--there are huge stakes involved in this game of mass communications and information manipulation.

Information organized and transmitted electronically and digitally has a different form, function and topographical organization that did the previous form of printed information. Its presentation, its processing and its impact is also changing in basic ways. We can talk about the continuous reshaping of our world-view--a reorganization of how our attitudes and values about the world, and of our own identities and the identities of others within it. Old boundaries of our prejudice and ignorance must yield and wash away under the flood of new information available through the Internet.

Electronic Information storage entails that a new form of literacy will take precedence over the previous form of textual literacy. This transformation of consciousness is an unavoidable consequence. Practically any kind of information of any level or quality will become available to anyone who has access to the Internet. The means of organization and presentation of this information will change in fundamental ways--the old outline form will yield increasingly to a new "electronic stream of consciousness" that will beget a style of learning and thinking that is based upon its interconnectivity with the virtual world.

This new world-view is a global world view--it is a globalized collective consciousness that we plug into each in our own way and on our own time. The structure of our social system is becoming increasingly intelligent, and superorganically synergistic, to use an organic analogy. As this informational capacity increases, communications become instantaneous around the globe and more direct than ever before. At the same time, people and organizations grow in their sensitivities and sensibilities about the world.

As our world views and collective attitudes and values are being reshaped, so too will our actions and what we do also become redefined thereby. This is an inevitable process. Thus the information revolution will have teleological consequences that will penetrate and influence almost every aspect of our shared and private lives.

These changes are inevitable. They will come regardless of government actions to prevent it. As more people connect up to the global system and share in its values, as the virtual system itself becomes more intelligent and responsive to the queries and needs of people, the system and its culture will begin to define itself more clearly and in a more differentiated sense. We cannot stop this process from now occurring--we can shape the direction in which it goes, and the overall consequences it will have in our lives.

But the current electronic information revolution will have many more consequences than we can now imagine--they will eventuate in a degree of applied automated intelligent systems which will have the consequence, as did early industrial revolutions, of freeing many more people from the drudgery of hands-on work. Increasingly people, liberated from the repetitive, mindless drudgery of the assembly line, will be given the opportunity to "make work" on-line.

Within a capitalist framework, this can result in the problem of the commons--the displacement and mass unemployment of people by new, more intelligent machines. This entails that political and economic reforms must keep pace with the rise and growth of electronic literacy and connectivity in the world, or else the potential for spreading the gap between haves and have-nots, or those in the know and those who remain outside of the information loop, and for fostering greater assymmetries and inequalities within the system, will be realized in a way never before imaginable.

It is for this reason that the information revolution must have greater entailments for change than just technological invention and development--we must apply the same lessons we are learning in the information technologies to inducing social innovations and new patterns of human development that effectively compensate, indeed are better than, the losses experienced in the transition from an old fossil-fuel service economy to a newer automated digital information economy.

At the basis of the information revolution is Buckminter Fullers anti-entropic formula--information through knowledge and communication creates synergistic patterns that defy the thermodynamic law of chaos. New information technologies create new values and new sources of value--these are invariably human in essence or meaning. They can effectively make something from nothing. It creates the possibility for new levels of integration and differentiation within the system that both empower the individual and realize greater resource potential for all individuals.

By means of the Internet, humans have the capacity as never before to define their own sense of value in the world, to realize their own individuality and creativity, and to influence and participate in the important affairs of the world as equals. Political organization takes on new meaning and scope over the Internet, when many people can meet in a collective virtual forum to deal with issues of mutual concern--we no longer need to depend upon periodic elections to choose representatives to do our bidding for us.

Gone are the dictators and military tyrants of the 20th Century who ruled by military violence and the threat of destruction. They have no place, no room, on the Internet except by futile attempts to control its access and by lame efforts to propagandize their own violence.

The Internet provides means for directly accessing the will and conscience of the people--far more cheaply and effectively even than the penny-presses of the late 19th Century. It presents people, all people the world over, with the opportunity and the possibility for achieving a new level of structural integration in the world, one that transcends all previous styles and methods of doing so. It remains up to the people themselves to try to achieve this new form of organization.

This global reorganization of human social relations entails that people must assume a collective orientation in a system that is largely self-organizing. Old forms of political organization cannot be trusted to disenfranchize themselves in the prospects of realizing a more stable global unity. In the final analysis, the information revolution becomes the revolution of the people, for the people and by the people. It becomes the freedom and responsibility that people must realize for themselves by means of the Internet.