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Preinternet and Prehistory
I remember when I
was 12 or so, the teacher explained that prehistory was
defined as the period before written history. In other words,
a population is prehistoric if it has no writing system. A prehistoric tribe
enters history as soon as a bloke invents a writing system. It didn’t make
sense to me. Why was a writing system so important? Why not use another
criterion like invention of metallurgy or the widespread use of agriculture?
I was to shy to raise my hand and ask the teacher... I remained puzzled for
a couple of days then I decided I had better things to do, for example play
marble with my friends.
A quarter of a
century later, in the first year of the 3rd millennium, I was browsing the
web and I stumbled across an interesting neologism: “preinternet era”.
The term was of course used to ironically refer to the dark ages prior to
the invention of the internet. Remember how life was tough back then?
Preinternet…
Prehistory… the definition of the word prehistory suddenly
made sense to me:
In its natural form, a human being is not much more than a naked hairless
monkey barely able to climb trees and scratch the ground to unearth edible
roots. What makes us different from the other animals is our ability to use
the knowledge and technology developed by our ancestors and accumulated over
successive generations. Even the member of the most primitive tribe uses a
huge amount of knowledge and technology inherited from his forefathers, for
example to make a knife with flint stone, to make a bow and arrow or a
fishing hook. When you think about it, the basic technology used everyday by
a primitive tribe is the impressive result of thousands of years of R&D.
Thousands of years of incremental improvements transmitted generation after
generation makes a tremendous difference between a primitive man and the
first human that emerged from “monkeykind”.
In the absence of a
writing system, knowledge can only be transmitted verbally and stored in the
human brain. The amount of knowledge that can be accumulated by a
prehistoric people is therefore limited by the size of the memory of a human
brain and by the ability of a prehistoric society to take the time to
verbally copy paste information from older brains to younger brains.
You now understand
that the invention of a writing system is a turning point in the
technological development of a human society. Once a writing system is in
place, the amount of knowledge that can be accumulated is no longer limited
by the size of the memory of the human brain. It becomes virtually
unlimited. The transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next
also becomes a lot easier and less time consuming. This explains why a
nation with a writing system is technologically far more advanced than a
prehistoric tribe.
Being able to write
down information is great; however if you want to share that information
with a larger number of people, you would ideally need a duplication system.
For many centuries, the only way to duplicate information was to manually
copy that information. That was typically done by monks patiently copying
the bible many times over. Now, you probably heard of Gutenberg, the German
genius who invented the mechanical press in 1439. The invention of the
mechanical press is the second turning point in the development of mankind.
With the mechanical press, it became possible to economically duplicate
information and make it available to millions of other people. The invention
of the mechanical press probably explains the acceleration of the
development of mankind during the past half millennium.
Being able to
economically duplicate information is great. Problem is that at some point,
you get completely overwhelmed by the huge amount of written information
accumulated over time. I don’t know about you, but when I enter a library, I
feel lost: hundreds of meters of shelves with tens of thousands of books…
how am I going to find the information I am looking for? How do I get
started? The reality is that I don’t go in libraries anymore: when I need
information, I go on the internet…
The internet is the
third turning point in the development of mankind. Not only it makes
information easier to duplicate but more importantly, information becomes
searchable and easier to access. The first turning point (the invention of a
writing system) and the second turning point (Gutenberg) both had tremendous
effects on the development of mankind and led to the world as we knew at the
end of the XXth century.
We can already feel
the impact of the third turning point (the internet) on our lives but I
suspect this is only the beginning. Over the course of the coming decades,
the internet will have profound effects on the technological and
intellectual development of
mankind maybe even more profound that the effects of the two previous
turning points.
Will there be a
fourth turning point? Maybe. And given the acceleration of the development
of mankind, it might come sooner than you think and maybe we will have a
chance to see it before we die. Gutenberg invented the mechanical press
several millennia after the invention of the first writing system. The
internet came only five and a half centuries after Gutenberg. The fourth
turning point could therefore happen just a few decades after the invention
of the internet… That means we could again enter a new era in the 2010s or
2020s…
What will it be
like? No idea. My grand-father was fully immersed in the Gutenberg era. He
was working for the Librairie Vuibert in Paris (In French librairie
doesn’t mean library but rather bookshop…). His
job was to check out typos before a book was sent to the printing factory.
When he died in 1971, there was no way he could have imagined what the
internet would be like. He would never have guessed that his grandson would
be fully immersed in the Internet era about the same way he was immersed in
the Gutenberg era. Even if a fourth turning point is just around the corner,
it remains beyond our imagination just like the internet was beyond
everybody’s imagination in the 1970s…
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