A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

The Evolution of IT

According to a broadly inclusive understanding of IT, the invention of alphabets, numerical notations and writing systems represents the earliest and most fundamental stage in the development of information technologies. This was certainly Plato’s view when he notoriously complained against written records in favour of a dialectical understanding of what is eternal and immutable (Phaedo 275a and ff.). Writing makes possible the diachronic accumulation of information as non-biological memory. But, if writing is the first step, it is then natural to interpret the invention of printing as its completion and hence as the following major revolution in IT. The mechanization of text reproduction made the accumulated information widely available to a potentially endless number of people. After the fifteenth century, universal alphabetization – that is, the translation of availability of information into its accessibility – came to be considered, for the first time in the history of human civilization, a feasible project.

The evolution of IT from Plato to Gutenberg is therefore largely understandable as the evolution of recording technologies. Then, from Leibniz to the Encyclopédie (1751–80), IT was at the center of a vast process of reorganization and restructuring of huge amounts of recorded information increasing exponentially. But. when the nineteenth century came to be dominated by the telegraph (Standage 1998), and IT became associated with communication technologies, ...