When I was about 8 years old, my school opened up a new computer room and we gained a subject called ‘Information Technology’. I’m not sure when, but at some point between when I learnt what a keyboard was in year 2, and when it became my default social tool as a teenager, we dropped the ‘I’ and just started calling this stuff ‘Technology’.

You might think describing something so broadly powerful as the Internet as just ‘information’ technology is limiting. But information isn’t a constraint, it’s the ultimate goal. A keyboard is used to send information but it’s also for interacting with the information you get back. A lot of what we do on computers is input — when people describe Facebook or Twitter, they’ll talk about sharing before they’ll talk about reading — but the power of the web doesn’t necessarily stem from the ability for you to have a voice. It’s everyone else’s voice that gives technology both it’s draw and it’s power. The output rather than the input; The information that you gain from using it.

I think it’s something we forget, both as users and builders. We spend more time listening then we do talking (the 1% rule is evident in many online communities like Wikipedia), and rightly so. Yet, Information Technology is ancient term. The cool-kids will happily say they work in a tech startup, but don’t you dare call them I.T guys. I think that’s a shame. The potential of the Internet as a tool is profoundly different from a hammer. Not because it’s a more complex, advanced technology, but because it’s fundamentally about information.

Maybe I’ve still got it wrong though. Maybe we’ve dropped the ‘I’ from the ‘T’ because we think it’s a problem that’s been solved now. Technology was about Information in the 90s, but then it became such a normalised form of communication that it became about relationships. We were sending Information at such a rate that we could converse with each other naturally. In the 00s, if there was an ‘I’, it would have stood for ‘Instant’.

Instant messaging is an obvious winning feature of a social networking site. I remember one particular social network practically killing MSN when they introduced it in 2008. Having a naturally paced discussion meant you could maintain relationships (at least partially) online. But just as a leather textured calendar made the iPhone feel more comfortable in the 00s, technology becoming more embedded into our lives means we can move away from the crutches of imitating real life, and start augmenting it.

When people talk about modern technology as a tool for social action, they talk about Twitter’s role in the Arab Spring or BlackBerry Messenger in the London riots. Sometimes immediacy is needed, but after the revolution comes the reactionary system. The revolution of immediate information has brought about the ability to react en masse to injustice, but that reaction is emotional in it’s immediacy. The system that we need now needs to not just amplify the most recent voice but the one that is most representative. The system we need is one that takes immediate information as granted, and users that can turn that into real change. The systems we need now are systems built to be Intelligent Technology.