John Naughton has a good post, a reflection on a Guardian article by Larry Elliott. Elliott suggests that the IT revolution doesn't match the first and second industrial revolutions in impact or creativity. Naughton wonders if 'Elliott is looking on too short a time span'.
Suppose, for example, that the Web turns out to be as radical a transformation in our communications ecology as the invention of printing. As a mass phenomenon, the Web is now 11 years old. Gutenberg's first bible was printed in 1455 in the German city of Mainz.Now try this thought experiment: it's 1466 and you are a MORI pollster standing with your clipboard on a street, doing an opinion survey on the town's residents.
Q1: Who is Johannes Gutenberg? Is he
(a) a butcher,
(b) a baker,
(c) a candlestick maker or
(d) a printer?
[Eh? What's a 'printer'?]Q2. Which of the following effects do you think printing by moveable type will have? Tick all that apply.
(a) Undermining of the authority of the Catholic Church
(b) The rise of Protestantism
(c) The emergence of 'science'
(d) The Romantic Movement
(e) The redefinition of 'childhood' as a period in life before young people become regarded as 'adults'You get the point. the invention of printing had all of these world-transforming effects, and more. But eleven years into the revolution, nobody could have foreseen them. My feeling is that the same may apply to the revolution that is underway now. The ground is shifting under our feet, but we cannot see it. The cultural impact of the IT revolution, in other words, will be visible only in retrospect.
