Information technologies travel together

Information technologies travel together, but it’s often not until several of them become common that they really shift an era.

In the case of Mesopotamian clay tablets, cuneiform writing (made by pressing a triangular stylus into a writing surface) and clay technology worked together. Curving script can’t be written on clay; cuneiform can’t effectively be written on papyrus.

Later, parchment technology existed for several hundred years before it met the codex¹ ⊕ ¹ A book with pages you turn, as we know it today. ,the hard split pen, and early Christianity’s mania for citation and really took off.

This has happened over and over. Typewriters, vertical files, carbon paper, trains, and telegraphs interacted to create a new approach to information and work in the 19th century. Looking at our current information landscape, it’s clear that social media and mobile devices didn’t come into existence at the exact same time, but that something was clearly missing from the equation when you had to doom-scroll on a laptop. Without the revolution in publishing that is “content creation,” a mobile device loses most of its appeal.

Q: Go back to Levy on this?

References

Frederick G. Kilgour. The evolution of the book . Oxford University Press. 1998.

Each information system has components that work together. In the case of clay tablets: manual writing, clay technology, and organization of collections of tablets. p. 16

Parchment existed before the codex but didn’t supplant papyrus until after the codex’s adoption in the 2nd century AD. p. 39

Yates, JoAnne. “From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence.” The Journal of Business Communication (1973), vol. 19, no. 3, July 1982, pp. 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/002194368201900301.

Carbon copying made a difference in communication, though it wasn’t dominant until vertical files took over. p. 15

From a memorial memo, it’s reported than an employee made it the “law of the Company …that no letters are to be mailed unless press copies are retained. In cases where you must either miss the train or not take the copy –miss the train and take the copy.” p. 8

The volume of paper to be managed increased due to the railroad, the telegraph (both as technologies and rapidly growing companies), and (eventually) the typewriter. p. 9