Period, Theme Event: Locating Information History in History

Reference

Black, Alistair, and Bonnie Mak. 2019. “Period, Theme, Event: Locating Information History in History.” https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:25457/.

My bookshelves are increasingly overstuffed with histories of information technologies. As a broadcast journalist and technology nerd who survived the digital transition, my scholarly interests have been shaped by the transformative years of the early internet, the emergence of the prematurely-heralded “Web 2.0,” the rising dominance of Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, and of course today’s social media and epistemological crisis. On one shelf I have Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought (Rheingold 1985), Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1988), Being Digital (Negroponte 1995), What Will Be (Dertouzos 1998), and The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine & Locke et al. 1999). On the “more scholarly” side of the shelf, I have Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet (Abbate 2000) along with Ceruzzi’s A History of Modern Computing (Ceruzzi 2000), and for my inner librarian there’s  also A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 (Bourne & Hahn 2003). In my Books for True Nerds section, there’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Kirschenbaum 2016), UNIX: A History and a Memoir (Kernighan 2020), and speaking of history, I’ve got Tom Standage’s “steampunk classic” (said the New York Times) The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (Standage 2014), plus his earlier book The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (Standage 2002).

These books are fascinating accounts of key innovations (and in some cases hype) in the history of information technologies. But none are examples of “Information History,” a field of information science research focusing on the role of information systems and practices in a given society, and how “information affected, and is affected by, the social, political, economic and cultural climates of the time” (Weller, 2007). The distinction is important: When we focus primarily on innovations in information technology, we risk flirting with technological determinism while forgetting about the social context. The question for information historians is not “how did this information technology come about,” but “how can we explore history by examining social practices around information and its infrastructures.”

But this question is so general it doesn’t provide much of an entry point for actual research. To address the problem of “where do we start,” Alistair Black and Bonnie Mak (2020) propose three specific lenses as an organizing paradigm: Period, Theme, and Event. Their paper details the usefulness of these as entry points for information history research, and presents a brief bibliographic survey of existing research as examples.

Use of “period” as an entry point for information history research allows the researcher to focus on information social practices and systems in a given time and place. An example that comes to mind (not cited in the paper) is Bruno Latour’s (1986) article “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” which argues that the mutability and mobility of information resulting from widespread use of the Gutenberg press played into existing social practices of European scientists during the Early Modern period, resulting in new forms of criticism and peer review that fostered the scientific revolution in Europe. Note that this does not imply that the printing press caused the scientific revolution, any more than the introduction of the automobile in 20th century American caused teenagers to have sex. The technical innovations were used by people in ways that facilitated their already existing purposes and practices. Moreover, those purposes and practices shaped the technical innovations in specific ways, sometimes with unintended consequences. 

“Theme” refers to any thematic focus, for example the social practices and information infrastructures used in war. Black and Mak identify power as a theme “that can be tracked through regimes of paperwork and networks of information management across the conventional boundaries of time, geographical region, and medium” (p.7). How do information systems and social practices relate to power, class, race, and gender across history? The authors refer to histories of state imperialism, wherein information played an essential role in the expansion of empires, the control of colonial populations, and the expropriation of their resources. Surveillance is also a theme that recurs throughout the historical record; The study of surveillance and resistance to it might prove useful in better understanding the social consequences of our current era of ubiquitous digital surveillance and datafication. 

And finally, Black and Mak suggest “Event” as a lens that information historians could use to examine any time and place. This may seem like an obvious place to start, but the authors caution that historical research has too often focused on “heroic” figures and “momentous” moments of history. Scholars more interested in “history from below” might find that information history “offers an avenue to explore people, systems, and events at the micro-level – and especially those that continue to be overlooked in favour of leading personalities and major technical advances” (p.11).

Because information has played an important role in every culture, information history could serve as a useful focal point for scholars in any field. Black and Mak note that information history remains under the radar even in information science, and in this article they advocate for its broader acceptance. I find their argument compelling, and the concepts they present useful for my own research. And thankfully, though I’m sure it wasn’t their intention, they have provided me with another reason to buy more books.

References

Abbate, Janet. 2000. Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262511155/inventing-the-internet/.

Bourne, Charles P., and Trudi Bellardo Hahn. 2003. A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262025386/a-history-of-online-information-services-19631976/.

Brand, Stewart. 1988. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Penguin Books.

Ceruzzi, P. 2000. A History of Modern Computing. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262531696/a-history-of-modern-computing/

Dertouzos, Michael. 1998. What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives. New York: HarperCollins. https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780062515407/what-will-be/.

Kernighan, Brian W. 2020. UNIX: A History and a Memoir. Seattle: Kindle Direct Publishing.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2016. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674417076.

Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” Knowledge & Society 6 (January): 1–40. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=14009533.

Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Seales, and David Weinberger. 1999. The Cluetrain Manifesto. New York: Perseus Books. 

Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books.

Rheingold, Howard. 1985. Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262681155/tools-for-thought/.

Standage, Tom. 2002. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. Berkley Trade.

Standage, Tom. 2014. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. Second Edition, Revised. New York London Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury USA.

Weller, Toni. 2007. “Information History: Its Importance, Relevance and Future.” Aslib Proceedings 59 (4/5): 437–48. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012530710817627.