A Brief History of Input
Is there still more information to come? How we became manic information addicts and what that means for the metaverse.
If we try to get an overview of how the overabundance of communication and information came about, we immediately face the multidimensionality of this endeavor. The sheer growth of information runs along with the development and spread of information carriers — from manuscripts to printed books, from floppy disks to the present Internet.
But the current abundance goes beyond the availability of information; it is also about communication and entertainment, the dissolution of the private non-commercialized sphere to the development of the smartphone — designed to absorb the last remnant of our attention in all the venues of our lives.¹
To cover the enormous range of developments, I have focused on turning points that triggered a fundamental realignment in at least one dimension: some developments have affected the abundance or accessibility of information. Others have allowed a new form of commercialization or placed different communication demands on the individual. Some developments have affected all dimensions.
Turning Point 1: From Language to Writing
It seems reasonable to use the development of writing as a starting point for the narrative. It appeared in several places about 5000 years ago to organize the population into larger cities.²
Writing helped with administration and organization and had the advantage that thoughts, ideas, and lore could be reliably preserved across the boundaries of space and time, independent of specific people as a medium. Of course, this also meant information sovereignty because reading was a skill that was only open to a small, privileged part of the population.
In addition to a broader permanence of ideas, writing could also create a concentration of knowledge in the form of libraries and collections. Collected knowledge was thus made available. Examples already from antiquity are the library of Alexandria and discoveries from Assyria and Babylonia.³ Even Information overload was already an issue: as early as 1255, the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais commented on it. Similar observations about the growing number of books have also survived from China.⁴ Therefore, information overload is not a phenomenon only experienced by people through digital technologies.
Turning Point 2: From Manuscript to Print
Around 1450, the invention of the printing press ushered in a revolution. The simplified production and distribution of printed matter made information, ideas, and intellectual currents accessible to a broader mass.
The monopoly on the information held by the powerful and learned began to falter. Slowly, a marketplace of ideas developed, and the foundation was laid for pluralism, completely changing society.⁵
In the Middle Ages, society consisted mainly of illiterate people who rarely left their homes and individually knew little about other parts of the world. The invention of serial letterpress printing made it possible to disseminate information more widely. Worldviews, ideas, and various cultural influences could reach more significant segments of the population for the first time. Literacy was advanced.⁶
The Reformation movement was one of the first European movements and big ideas to benefit from Johannes Gutenberg’s invention. Through the printing process, Martin Luther’s ideas were able to spread enormously.⁷
Turning Point 3: New ways of dissemination. Postal routes and mass media.
Industrial printers and significant advances in transportation in the 19th century significantly accelerated the dissemination of printed matter and thus information.
Central to this was establishing a reliable and far-reaching postal service, which was accomplished in the 19th century. New printing presses made it possible to achieve mass print runs and ensure publication at shorter notice. Trains, airplanes, and boats could deliver printed matter in more significant quantities, faster, and more reliably.⁸
Communication also found new ways: via the spread of newspapers from the 18th century, the spread of telegraphy from the mid-19th century, and the use of mail and carrier pigeons.⁹
But increased sensory impressions have also been described. In his book, The Big Cities and Intellectual Life, sociologist Georg Simmel hypothesized that the modern urban environment was an overload for its inhabitants compared to rural areas. Critical impulses toward the new forms of communication and abundance of impressions have also come from American transcendentalism since the mid-19th century. H.D. Thoreau’s work Walden, as a representative of this current, impressively draws the turning away from impressions of the world and turning to nature.¹⁰
Turning Point 4: The Telephone
Before the invention and spread of the telephone, communication by letter took days or weeks to reach the recipient.
While telegraphy was only suitable for short information, and signs such as flags or tones did not allow personal communication, only letters allowed real in-depth exchanges over long distances. The invention of the telephone represented a radical change in this respect. It made personal communication over long distances possible for the first time.¹¹
The invention and almost immediate acceptance of the telephone after 1876 is evidence that new technological developments are quickly adopted by society when they fit with social realities. On the one hand, the phone impacted economic life because it dramatically reduced the time it took to transmit orders or make transactions and enabled the efficient organization of large mass-producing manufacturing enterprises.
On the other hand, it also impacted the dissemination of information because it significantly reduced the period between the occurrence of an event and the possible public knowledge of it. Thus, it gave an impetus to the development of mass culture.¹²
Turning point 5: Mass Media
While the spread of newspapers and printed works had already significantly expanded the circle of recipients, the rapid spread of radio and television finally led to the phenomenon of “mass media” as we know it today. Audiovisual media established themselves because they have a high degree of fidelity. While texts are symbolic representations that must be decoded, this step is omitted when consuming videos or radio broadcasts. They hardly need to be solved but are experienced by the viewer.¹³
However, it is not only accessibility that has played a role in the enormous success of audiovisual media but also the emergence of leisure time for large sections of the population. The high standard of living in the Western world ensured access to media at home, and free time could be filled with the content of the new media.¹⁴
The spread of audiovisual media was accompanied in parallel by another development, namely the increasing dissolution between the commercialized public sphere and the private sphere of the home. Between the 1890s and 1920s, advertising became more and more suitable for the masses, but with almost no intrusion into people’s private sphere.
One had to consciously buy a newspaper or magazine and thus bring it home. With the spread of radios and televisions, the home disappeared as a retreat from commercialism. Advertising, propaganda, and world events could penetrate more and more into the private sphere and directly affect there.¹⁵
Turning point 6: The Internet
The Internet began in the context of U.S. military research. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it evolved into a project of civilian academic institutions and became increasingly internationalized. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World-Wide-Web, had a vision of a system that could link documents and allow information to be collected, administered, and updated.¹⁶
Over time, the Internet has become a universal communication medium whose importance continues to grow. It is the most recent mass medium that combines and utilizes almost all aspects of previous mass media. But the user decides what she watches, listens to, or reads and when for herself. In addition, the thematic breadth is no longer limited. While legal, moral, and practical barriers exist for other media, these largely disappear on the Internet. You can find anything on any topic, otherwise taboo things.¹⁷
However, the Internet makes information of all kinds accessible and findable, but its structure has also led to the development of an enormous wealth of offerings. It consists of a continuous stream of texts, sounds, and images. There are millions of channels on the web; how many millions are only estimable. Currently, hundreds of millions of registered domain names are active, and there are more than 1.7 billion websites¹⁸.
Turning Point 7: The Smartphone
The smartphone made its breakthrough in 2007 when Apple (AAPL) introduced the first iPhone. Its design perfectly met the needs of society at the time: the desire for mobility, accessible communication, entertainment, and the need for professional and private networking and information. The world was suddenly in your pocket, and the combination of communication with multimedia changed everything.¹⁹
The smartphone was not an Apple invention, even though its design was indeed an innovation. The combination of telephone and computer functions existed much earlier. The first BlackBerry device was introduced as early as 1999. BlackBerrys made it possible to receive and answer emails and surf the Internet. From today’s perspective, the joking name “CrackBerry”²⁰ at the time — which referenced BlackBerry’s addictive properties — seems downright naïve, given the rapid developments of the next few decades.
The smartphone carries the potential of the Internet into every aspect of our lives, letting us merge with the world by connecting us to it. We always have the Internet, all its knowledge, and the connection to our social contacts and work with us.
Turning Point 8: Social Media and Big Tech
Social media has changed the world and has a growing impact on finding partners, how and what news we consume, and how we organize and exchange ideas. Social media has even changed many social behaviors and norms. The social media infrastructure has penetrated deep into our culture in less than a decade.²¹
Online and offline worlds are interpenetrating. What initially began with the intention of finding friends and acquaintances and staying in touch has developed into a part of reality that extends into the political arena. It is no longer solely reporting on social media as a medium that takes place. Still, through Donald Trump and Twitter, it has become visible that politics also takes place on social media.
The enormous size and spread of social media coupled with only a few providers also highlight the dangers for societies worldwide. This is because access to information, data for commercialization, and influence are in a few hands and are not managed transparently. The power to decide how our data is used is not made democratically but is based on the providers’ business interests.
Through the application of psychological insights and the enormously accurate profiles of us fed by a flood of data, targeted marketing and the possibility of political influence is no longer only possible but can and is being implemented. Social media platforms now have an overwhelming position and can offer or carry out control and manipulation on an unprecedented level.
Turning point 9: The Metaverse?
Many of us already spend most of the day in the digital environment. With direct and unlimited accessibility, the smartphone has already blurred the line between analog and digital reality. Is there more to come? Or even more possible?
Many people couldn’t imagine the extent of remote work and online meetings before the pandemic hit. Now, this is a new normal, and even technophobes have adapted. We tend to look at new developments with incredible naiveté: Chatrooms, Social Media, or disruptive Startups seem like a sideline — until they aren’t.
We should listen carefully when Mark Zuckerberg tells us what he has in mind for our society. The outcome might be more sinister than the ridiculous virtual-reality office Facebook launched this year.
References
1 Derek R. Rutter, Communicating by Telephone, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2013; Sidney H. Aronson, The Sociology of the Telephone, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 12.3 (1971), 153–67 (p. 154).
2 Brian M. Fagan, Writing, in: The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 761–62 (p. 761f).
3 Siegfried Vorstius, Joris; Joost, Grundzüge Der Bibliotheksgeschichte, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1977, p. 2ff.
4 Vincent von Beauvais, Bibliotheca mundi (Douai 1624) I: speculum naturale, Prolog, 1; Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64.1 (2003), 11; Ann Blair, Information Overload’s 2,300-Year-Old History. Harvard Business Review. [30.7.2020].
5 Poe, Marshall T. 2010, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 102, 125, 141; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press, 1980, 7f, 685ff.
6 Poe, Marshall T. 2010, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 141.
7 Sieburg, Gutenberg als Medienrevolution. In: Georg Mein/Heinz Sieburg, Medien des Wissens. Interdisziplinäre Aspekte von Medialität. Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2014, pp. 99–114.
8 Poe, Marshall T. 2010, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 135.
9 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2016) — “Literacy”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/literacy' [Online Resource]
10 Georg Simmel, Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903), in Georg Simmel Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, Band I, hrsg Krampe, Rammtest, Rammstedt, Suhrkamp Gesamtausgabe Band 7 1995, 116.
11 Argyle, Michael (2013), Communicating by Telephone, 21
12 Aronson, S. H. (1971). The Sociology of the Telephone, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 12(3), 153–167. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156854271X00119, pp. 154–166.
13 Poe, Marshall T. 2010, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 171, 179.
14 Poe, Marshall T. 2010, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 184, 190.
15 Wu, Attention Merchants, 9, 83–84.
16 Braun, Geschichte und Entwicklung des Internets, Informatik Spektrum, 33/2 2010, 205- 206.
17 Braun, Geschichte und Entwicklung des Internets, Informatik_Spektrum_33_2_2010,205- 206; Poe, Marshall T. 2010, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 102, 125, 141, 231; Ahmed, F., Shafiq, M. Z., & Liu, A. X. (2016). The Internet is for Porn: Measurement and Analysis of Online Adult Traffic. 2016 IEEE 36th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS).
18 Armstrong, How many websites are there? https://www.statista.com/chart/19058/how-many-websites-are-there/ (8.5.2021)
19 A. J. Reid (2018), The Smartphone Paradox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94319-0_2. 36
20 A. J. Reid (2018), The Smartphone Paradox. 44
21 Ortiz-Ospina, The rise of social media, Our World in Data, Global Change Data Lab, 2019; https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media#licence (5.6.2021)
