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Understanding the Internet and the World Wide Web (hereafter, Web) as just one more in a long history of technological developments [3] is to begin to understand the much larger reality of the history of what Jacques Ellul refers to as technique. Man the tool-maker and tool-user is a well-worn metaphor [4]. Our history is filled with records of our tools and technologies. Epochs are measured by their most important technological developments. The Stone Age is followed by the Bronze Age is followed by the Iron Age which is followed by the Steel Age. Postman (1992), noted that Lewis Mumford preferred the Eotechnic, Paleotechnic, and the Neotechnic while Walter Ong preferred the Oral, Chirographic, Typographic, and Electronic ages (p. 22). Even language is seen as a tool by the likes of McLuhan and Ong (Ong, 1982, chpt. 4).
American history is sometimes divided into eras defined by the mode of transportation: horse, railroad, car, and airplane. According to Daniel Chandler (1995), the agrarian age was followed by the industrial age, and now, the information age. Of course the plow, the factory, and the computer are icons which define the age in question. Techno-evolutionists define the times by the prominent technology: the atomic age, the space age, the computer age and so on.
Langdon Winner (1984) reminded us that, "it is not uncommon for the advent of a new technology to provide for flights of utopian fancy" (p. 301). He continued by pointing to the factory system, the telephone, the automobile, television, and nuclear energy, and for each the accompanying promise of a new and glorious age. One era in American history worth remembering for its similarity to our current state was the 1930s-the dawn of electrical energy. In chapter five of Communication As Culture, James Carey with John Quirk explored "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution." A striking familiarity between then and now can be realized in the numerous quotations that Carey and Quirk provide-quotations which capture the optimism that surrounded the introduction of this new technology. As an example, consider this quote from Stuart Chase's article "A Vision in Kilowatts" in Fortune magazine, 1933.
In its full development, electricity can yoke a whole continental economy into something like one unified machine, one organic whole. The parts may be small, flexible, located where you please, but with their central station connections. Electricity can give us universally high standards of living, new and amusing kinds of jobs, leisure, freedom and an end to drudgery, congestion, noise, smoke, and filth. It can overcome the objections and problems of a steam civilization. It can bring back many of the mourned virtues of the handicraft age without the human toil and curse of impending scarcity that marked the age. (quoted in Carey, 1992, p. 130) [5]
The history of technological developments would not be complete without mention of the all too frequent misfires and unexpected consequences of technology. Postman (1992), Rybczynski (1983) and Mumford, especially in his The Myth of the Machine, detail cases of inventions that had consequences that the inventor never imagined.
Click Here for A Brief Timeline of Modern Technology
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