Technology & Engineering
Internet Revolution
The Internet Revolution refers to the transformative impact of the internet on society, communication, and commerce. It has revolutionized how people access information, communicate, and conduct business, leading to significant social and economic changes. The widespread adoption of the internet has connected people globally and facilitated the rapid exchange of information and ideas.
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5 Key excerpts on "Internet Revolution"
eBook - ePubPhilosophy and Computing
An Introduction
- Luciano Floridi(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 3
A revolution called Internet
The Internet as a basic technological change
The Internet is the most revolutionary phenomenon in the history of ICT since the diffusion of personal computers in the 1970s. It is a basic technological change not in the sense that it is simple or independent of other previous technology, as the wheel was, but because it lays the foundation for a number of other economic, technological and social transformations, as the steam engine or the telephone did. By so describing it, not only do we acknowledge the fact that the Internet has become the centre of a technological whirlpool that is rapidly affecting most aspects of advanced societies, we also make it possible to apply to its evolution Schumpeter’s classic model of the three stages in the development of a technology: invention, innovation and diffusion.The invention stage (1968–84): the Internet as a Cartesian networkIn 1963, Arthur C. Clarke published a story called Dial F for Frankenstein, in which he imagined the following scenario. On 31 January 1974 the last communications satellite is launched in order to achieve, at last, full interconnection of the whole international telephone system. The day after, all the telephones in the world ring at once. It is the horrible cry of an artificial supermind, born out of the global network of 80 billion individual switches in the world’s automatic exchanges.Of course, the story was a piece of science fiction, and nobody remembered it in 1975, when Apple launched its first models of personal computer. We were at the beginning of the second age of information technology: during the following ten years personal computers achieved mass diffusion, and became an indispensable commodity. In 1982 Time
eBook - PDFInside the Future
Surviving the Technology Revolution
- Henry C. Lucas Jr.(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
While our focus is on technologically-enabled transformations, it is important to recognize that technology is only an enabler. It does not determine the nature of an innovation or the outcome of implementing it. Technology did not initiate eBay—Pierre Omidyar used the capabilities of the Internet to build eBay. The technology did not create the application, but the existence of the technology influenced the development of eBay’s business model. Technology works in con- junction with complementary innovations, strategies, new business models, and work processes to produce a transformation. IS THERE AN IT REVOLUTION? Future historians will compare the widespread adoption of information tech- nology during the last half of the twentieth century with the Industrial Revolution 150 years earlier. Alfred Chandler, in his book A Nation Transformed by Informa- tion (2000), describes how he changed his thinking about the importance of information: [W]e realized that what we were considering was not an industrial revolution, but an information revolution—a revolution that evolved from the industrial world of the twentieth century. Moreover, this information revolution has transformed the indus- trial world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as profoundly as the First and Second Industrial Revolutions transformed the earlier commercial world of the eighteenth century. (Chandler and Cortada, p. 3; italics added) He continues to discuss the impact of information on the economy: Our authors (1) review the changing technological underpinnings—or, to use a modern term, infrastructure—of the means of transmitting information, (2) con- sider the changing nature of the recipients of the information flows, and (3) analyze the ways in which the recipients used these flows to shape and reshape U.S.
eBook - ePub- Manuel Castells(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
9The prophetic hype and ideological manipulation characterizing most discourses on the information technology revolution should not mislead us into underestimating its truly fundamental significance. It is, as this book will try to show, at least as major an historical event as was the eighteenth-century industrial revolution, inducing a pattern of discontinuity in the material basis of economy, society, and culture. The historical record of technological revolutions, as compiled by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell,10 shows that they are all characterized by their pervasiveness , that is by their penetration of all domains of human activity, not as an exogenous source of impact, but as the fabric in which such activity is woven. In other words, they are process-oriented , besides inducing new products. On the other hand, unlike any other revolution, the core of the transformation we are experiencing in the current revolution refers to technologies of information processing and communication .11 Information technology is to this revolution what new sources of energy were to the successive industrial revolutions, from the steam engine to electricity, to fossil fuels, and even to nuclear power, since the generation and distribution of energy was the key element underlying the industrial society. However, this statement on the pre-eminent role of information technology is often confused with the characterization of the current revolution as essentially dependent upon new knowledge and information. This is true of the current process of technological change, but so it is of preceding technological revolutions, as is shown by leading historians of technology, such as Melvin Kranzberg and Joel Mokyr.12 The first industrial revolution, although not science-based, relied on the extensive use of information, applying and developing pre-existing knowledge. And the second industrial revolution, after 1850, was characterized by the decisive role of science in fostering innovation. Indeed, R&D laboratories appeared for the first time in the German chemical industry in the last decades of the nineteenth century.13
No longer available |Learn more- June Jamrich Parsons(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 1 3 I What is the future of the digital revolution? If we can learn one thing from the evolving Information Age, it is this: change is inevita-ble. Today, your favorite social media platform is Facebook; in the future, Facebook may go the way of CompuServe. You’re comfortable with a touchscreen now, but in the future, digital devices might be controlled by your neural impulses. On the near horizon, the Internet of Things seems to be gaining momen-tum. Picture virtually every appliance—every washing machine, vending machine, vehicle, door latch, plumbing fixture, light bulb, gadget, and doo-hickey—equipped with a computer chip and transmitter. Then picture these devices communicating with each other. Your refrigerator senses that an item has been removed and confirms with your trashcan that you’ve thrown away an empty Cool Whip container. It checks your smartphone, discovers you’re at the supermarket, and sends you a text message saying “Buy Cool Whip.” So what’s the point? Learning about digital technology is not just about circuits and electronics, nor is it only about digital gadgets, such as computers and portable music players. Digital technology permeates the very core of modern life. Understanding how this technology works and thinking about its potential can help you comprehend many issues related to privacy, security, freedom of speech, and intellectual property. It will help you become a better consumer and give you insights into local and world events. As you continue to read this textbook, don’t lose sight of the big picture. On one level, you might be simply learning about how to use a computer and software in this course. On a more profound level, however, you are accu-mulating knowledge about how digital technology applies to broader cultural and legal issues that are certain to affect your life far into the future. 1. Data was the computing technol-ogy behind the first phase of the digital revolution.
- Afif Osseiran, Jose F. Monserrat, Patrick Marsch(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
1 Introduction Afif Osseiran, Jose F. Monserrat, Patrick Marsch, and Olav Queseth 1.1 Historical background The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector was born in the twenty- first century out of a consolidation of two major industry sectors of the last century, the telecommunications industry and the computing industry. This book is designated to harness the momentum of the mobile telecommunications industry to a fifth generation of technologies. These technologies will allow completing the consolidation of services, content distribution, communications and computing into a complex distributed envir- onment for connectivity, processing, storage, knowledge and intelligence. This conso- lidation is responsible for a blurring of roles across the board, with computing and storage being embedded in communication infrastructure, process control being dis- tributed across the Internet and communication functions moving into centralized cloud environments. 1.1.1 Industrial and technological revolution: from steam engines to the Internet The ICT sector arose out of a natural marriage of telecommunications with the Internet, and is presiding over a tremendous change in the way information and communications services are provisioned and distributed. The massive and wide- spread adoption of mobile connected devices is further driving deep societal changes with tremendous economic, cultural and technological impact to a society that is becoming more networked and connected. Humanity is going through a phase of a technological revolution that originated with the development of semiconductors and the integrated circuit and continued with the maturing of Information Technology (IT) sector and the development of modern electronic communication in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively.
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