Conceptual Founders of Digital Age
In the second chapter of Learning theory and online technologies , Harasim (2007) gives a broad overview of what she describes as four communication paradigms from 40,000 BCE to the present. They are: 1) Speech 2) Writing 3) Printing (and therefore mass communication) 4) Internet.
For people like me who are interested in the philosophical and scientific foundations of the Internet her description of what she calls paradigm four is a significant contribution. It is an historical overview, yet, importantly, introduces key movements and figures such as Dr. Douglas Engelbart and J.C.R. Licklider. These figures were true visionaries who conceptualized what we now encounter on a daily basis.
For my peers who may want to go deeper into either of those resources you really ought to consider first viewing the video demo that resulted from Engelbart’s seminal 1962 paper on augmenting the human intellect. In the abstract of his paper of the same name, or more precisely, Augmenting the Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Englebart gives his motivation for the work ahead of him: “improving the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being”(1962).
The significance of his work cannot be overstated because the way people and culture interact with computers and the Internet is precisely the type of augmentation he conceptualized in…
