Information History in the Modern World

Histories of the Information Age

Toni Weller, Toni Weller

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781350307476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historiografía

Information has a rich but under explored history. The information age of the late twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new history of information and, in this timely collection of essays, a team of international scholars from a variety of disciplines examines the changing understandings of information in the modern world. Situating the concept of information in varying historical contexts since the eighteenth century, Information History in the Modern World: Histories of the Information Age:
- Explores how this historical research can challenge our perceptions of the information age in the global twenty-first century
- Discusses ephemera, wars, imagery, empire, identification and the transience of history in the digital era
- Argues that the changing uses, perceptions and manifestations of information helped to shape the world we know today. Authoritative and approachable, this is an invaluable resource for anyone who is interested in how and why information has become a distinguishing feature of the modern world.

1

INTRODUCTION

Toni Weller

INFORMATION HISTORY

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, information has become increasingly commonplace: an everyday commercial and cultural commodity, ubiquitous in our daily lives. The idea of information has taken on a new importance and value. Theorists such as Frank Webster, Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas have discussed the notion of our contemporary world as an ‘information society’, as information has become recognized ‘as a distinguishing feature of the modern world’.¹ The issues of the information age surround us in public debate, in political discourse and in cultural considerations: the ‘surveillance state’, personal privacy, information design, the collection of information, information access and information dissemination, amongst many other issues.

From the late 1990s there has emerged a train of historical thought which questions the origins of these themes; asking to what extent they are a product of this new information age, and to what extent they are age-old debates brought into popular focus by the new emphasis on all things ‘information’.² Such a line of thinking also has also begun to challenge the way we think of information historically. Hobart and Schiffman suggested in 2000 that to a society immersed in information, ‘the claim that information once did not exist, that it has a history, sounds absurd’.³ However, until the late 1990s and early 2000s, scholars had not explored the idea of information historically at all. The old adage that the present affects the way we study the past, or, more to the point, that present issues can influence what we deem important to study about the past, has proved itself to be as true as ever. In previous generations, the 1960s witnessed a new historiography of crime following social challenges to the establishment after the Second World War.⁴ The 1970s saw an interest in women in history when the dominant issue of the day was feminism.⁵ Likewise, the late 1990s and 2000s have seen a new exploration of the multifarious roles, uses and meanings of information in past societies, emerging from our contemporary fascination with information debates and concerns. As Peter Burke has argued, ‘we should not be too quick to assume that our age is the first to take these questions [of information] seriously’.⁶ This ‘information turn’ in scholarly thinking forms the basis of this collection of essays.

The book attempts to draw some of this work together; to explore information in the context of the history of the modern world; and to suggest some alternate histories of the contemporary information age. The contributors to this book do not suggest any kind of inevitable Whiggish progression towards ‘the information age’; rather, they explore the concept of information in a variety of historical contexts. The chapters in this volume are discrete histories in their own right, but they are drawn together by a common historiography of information. A recent review of the literature of information history over the past decade suggested that such scholarship has two key features in common:

The first is an overt and explicit recognition that the historical study of information adds a new perspective to more traditional histories, that they complement each other, but that the information discourse is something new. This is definitely a phenomenon of the last ten to fifteen years ... The second is a sense, from the authors, that they are in some way contributing to a bigger picture, building up a new chronology and historiography of information, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.⁷

These commonalities can be applied to each of the chapters of this book. As individual studies they are fascinating; as a whole they offer a bigger picture of how the history of information can challenge our understandings of the modern information age, and add other perspectives to more established historical discourses.

Consequently, these chapters do not define or differentiate between information, knowledge, facts, wisdom or any other variants on the theme. There has been a great deal of literature on how these ideas should be defined, particularly within the library and information-science community,⁸ but such definitions can be counterproductive in historical studies. In fact, the need to define information explicitly in this way is a recent development of the information age. As research into nineteenth-century Britain has shown, past societies did not feel the need to differentiate between such concepts, and we should not impose definitions upon the past.⁹ Information is heterogeneous. It ‘is multifaceted, so ... multiple definitions apply concurrently’.¹⁰ The multiple definitions that information has been afforded in recent decades are a good example of the ‘language game’ of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in which the meaning of a word should be identified by the way in which it is used, rather than by any single definition.¹¹ In this book therefore, the concept of information is defined and explored in relation to the specific historical context of each chapter, which changes according to focus and historical interpretation.¹² This is not so much a grand narrative; it is a grand perspective.

THE MODERN WORLD

The chronology of information history in the modern world does require some definition, however. The idea of modernity is complex, usually associated with the rise of nationalism and empire, capitalism, secularization and the growth of the state.¹³ Such associations mean that the concept of the ‘modern’ world tends to be dated from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, although others have posited its origins much earlier or much later.¹⁴ Whilst there is no chronological restriction on the historical study of information – recent studies have explored information in the Roman Empire and in early modern Japan and Europe, for example¹⁵ – this volume focuses on the era of the post-Enlightenment and post-industrial world from 1750 onwards. This era witnessed critical changes in scientific and cultural thinking and experience which had profound consequences for the way in which information was perceived and used within society.

Politically, the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth saw huge changes to the established order. In America, the War of Independence in the late 1770s and the Civil War almost a century later helped to establish the United States as a new political player. The revolution of 1789 in France and the subsequent revolutionary wars sent tremors throughout Europe which were still being felt in the revolutions of 1848. Both American and French conflicts emphasized the idea of liberties, civil rights and freedom of expression. Access and dissemination of information took on greater significance. Whilst largely stifled in the immediate aftermath by the reactionary conservative governments of Europe, more liberal ideals associated with Enlightenment traditions began to emerge in the salons and coffee houses of the West as well as through informal information exchanges. Publications such as Tatler put down coffee houses as their editorial addresses, and different locations specialized in different types of information: political, shipping, society or economic.¹⁶

It was not just coffee houses that utilized the liberal ideas of expression. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a tremendous growth in print culture throughout the world. This was the era of the periodical and the newspaper, aided by the application of steam technology to printing and the abolition of taxes on paper.¹⁷ Most cities in Europe had their own publications. Cheap ‘penny magazines’, based on the original Penny Magazine in England, were aimed at the new working classes, and had wide distribution in both Europe and America. The movements for education and political reform questioned to what extent the masses should have access to ‘useful’ information, pointing to the dangers of an informed radical mass.¹⁸ The revolutionary decades of 1780 to 1820 saw much state censorship of the radical press throughout Europe, but this did not prevent the growth of cheap publications which drew attention to the political and social issues of the day.¹⁹ Books were published on topics of all kinds, from science and geography to music, history and art. Education became a popular subject for books, following John Locke’s influential essay of 1693, Some Thought Concerning Education, reprinted in numerous editions throughout the nineteenth century.²⁰ By the early twentieth century state-provided formal education had became the norm, and literacy rates rose accordingly.

Not only were more books, periodicals and newspapers being published than ever before, but the communications revolution meant that information could be shared much more quickly and effectively. Throughout Europe and North America the number of railway lines soared during the mid-nineteenth century, carrying passengers, publications – and ideas – with them. The telegraph, telephone and postal systems helped to communicate and disseminate information, with the technological developments of the latter twentieth century allowing unprecedented democratization and access to information via digital technologies and the internet.²¹ Such openness and dissemination brought their own problems, and issues of theft, censorship and transgression arose. Criminals utilized new communication and information technologies just as much as they had done with earlier technologies and tools.²² Dissention could be communicated just as easily as acquiescence.

By the late nineteenth century the growth of imper...