Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:53:41.772Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rendezvous with Information? Computers and Communications Networks in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Richard R. John
Richard R. John
Affiliation:
Richard R. John is associate professor of history at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Introduction
Information
Business History Review , Volume 75 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Computers and Communications Networks , Spring 2001 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Anderson, Christopher, “The Internet: The Accidental Superhighway,” Economist 336 (1 July 1995): 4Google Scholar.

2 Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, U.K., 1996), 1Google Scholar.

3 The process of digital convergence, one scholar explains, “implies that a computer begins to incorporate the functionality of a communicating device, and the telephone takes on the functionality of a computer.” Yoffie, David B., “CHESS and Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence,” in Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence, ed. Yoffie, (Boston, Mass., 1997), 2Google Scholar. Not everyone is convinced that digital convergence will lead to a consolidation of the information industry. For some dissenting views, see Flichy, Patrice, Dynamics of Modern Communication: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies (London, 1995), 148–50Google Scholar; and Usselman, Steven W., “Computer and Communications Technology,” in Kutler, Stanley I., ed., Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), vol. 2, 826–7Google Scholar. Flichy predicted that digital convergence will be slowed by the incompatible corporate cultures of the computer and telecommunications industries. Usselman highlighted the impediments to integration posed by government regulation and continuing technical innovations in transmission techniques. Even in the “age of interconnection,” Usselman concluded, the hallmarks of American communications will remain competition, innovation, and access (p. 827).

4 Leavitt, Harold J. and Whisler, Thomas L., “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review 36 (Nov.-Dec. 1958): 41Google Scholar.

5 “Telematics” is French in origin and enjoyed a brief vogue in the United States following the translation of Nora, Simon and Mine's, Alain The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France (Cambridge, Mass., 1980Google Scholar). See, for example, Schiller, Dan, Telematics and Government (Norwood, N. J., 1982Google Scholar). “Compunications” was coined by Harvard engineering professor Anthony Oettinger, and is discussed briefly in Daniel Bell, “Teletext and Technology: New Networks of Knowledge and Information in Postindustrial Society,” in Bell, , The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960–1980 (New York, 1980), 39Google Scholar. “Informationalism” (patterned on “industrialism”) is a favorite phrase of sociologist Manuel Castells. For an early usage, see Castells, , The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 307–8Google Scholar. “Industrialism,” Castells explained, “is oriented towards economic growth, that is, towards the increasing of output. Informationalism is oriented towards technological development, that is, towards the accumulation of knowledge.”

6 The historical literature on computing is enormous. The most accessible general history is Campbell-Kelly, Martin and Aspray, William, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. For a survey of topics of special relevance to business historians, see Cortada, James W., Information Technology as Business History: Issues in the History and Management of Computers (Westport, Conn., 1996Google Scholar), and Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The Computer Industry: The First Half-Century,” in Yoffie, David B., ed., Computing in the Age of Digital Convergence (Boston, Mass., 1997), 37–122Google Scholar. On the computer's technical development, see Ceruzzi, Paul E., A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass., 1998Google Scholar). Historical writing on communications networks is less abundant and more uneven. For a good journalistic account, see Rowland, Wade, The Spirit of the Web: The Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet (Toronto. 1997Google Scholar). Also valuable is Usselman, “Computer and Communications Technology.” For its political dimension, see Stone, Alan, How America Got On-Line: Politics, Markets, and the Revolution in Telecommunications (Armonk, N. Y., 1997Google Scholar). The implications of digital convergence for historical writing is touched on in Edwards, Paul N., “Virtual Machines, Virtual Infrastructures: The New Historiography of Information Technology,” Isis 89 (March 1998): 93–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Internet, see Abbate, Janet, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 1999Google Scholar) and Hughes, Thomas P., Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects that Changed the World (New York, 1998Google Scholar), ch. 6.

7 Bob Metcalfe, “ISDN is the Information Age Infrastructure,” Infoworld (Dec. 1992), cited in Headrick, Daniel R., When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York, 2000), 3Google Scholar. Metcalfe picked this day because it marked the completion of the first transatlantic all-digital telephone call.

8 Twentieth-century events that are often hailed as harbingers of the information age include the invention of the transistor in 1947 and the patenting of the integrated circuit in 1959. For historian of technology Daniel R. Headrick, the beginnings of the information age went back to the age of “reason and revolution” that spanned the century and a half between 1700 and 1850. For cultural historians Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, its origins were coterminous with the advent of writing in classical antiquity. Headrick, When Information Came of Age, esp. pp. 3–14; Hobart, Michael E. and Schiffman, Zachary S., Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar.

9 Castells, Network Society, 5. Volumes 2 and 3 are titled, respectively, The Power of Identity (Oxford, U.K., 1997Google Scholar), and End of Millennium (Oxford, U.K., 1998)Google Scholar.

10 Castells, Network Society, ch. 1.

11 Castells, Network Society, 59. Historians, of course, have long recognized the role of the military in the innovation process. For a sampling of recent work on this topic, see Hughes, Agatha C. and Hughes, Thomas P., eds., Systems, Experts, Computers: The Systems Approach in World War II and After (Cambridge, Mass., 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For a general introduction, see Smith, Merritt Roe, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1985Google Scholar). Recent monographs that document the influence of military priorities on innovations in information technology include Edwards, Paul N., The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass., 1996Google Scholar); Norberg, Arthur L. and O'Neill, Judy E., Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986 (Baltimore, 1996Google Scholar); Saxenian, AnnaLee, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994Google Scholar); and Leslie, Stuart W., The Cold War and American Science: The Milltary-lndustrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1992Google Scholar).

12 On this point, Castells concurred with most of the essayists featured in Smith, Merritt Roe and Marx, Leo, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994Google Scholar). Castells cited this volume approvingly, and took pains to defend himself against a similar critique. Castells, Network Society, 5. The informational society, he explained, was not the superstructure of a new technological paradigm. Rather, it was the product of the “historical tension” between the material power of information processing and the individual's quest for a meaningful cultural identity. Castells, End of Millennium, 67. At its most basic, Castells declared, his theme was the “bipolar opposition” in modern societies between global networks of instrumental exchange (“the Net”) and the individual's highly particularistic and historically rooted search for meaning (“the Self”). Castells, Network Society, 3.

13 Castells, Network Society, 21.

14 Castells enjoined historians to compare and contrast the recent globalization of information technology, communications, and politics, with analogous transformations in the less distant past. Should historical scholarship challenge his conclusions, Castells promised to revise future versions of his work. Until it did, he remained convinced that such an inquiry would highlight the “radically new processes” in technology, finance, communications, and politics that have unfolded since the 1970s. Castells, Power of Identity, 244–5, fn. 4.

15 Castells, Network Society, 57; End of Millennium, 336 fn. 1.

16 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The Information Age in Historical Perspective,” in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Cortada, James W., eds. (New York, 2000), 8, 15Google Scholar.

17 Chandler, “Information Age,” 4.

18 Ibid.

19 Chandler and Cortada, “The Information Age: Continuities and Differences,” in Chandler and Cortada, Nation Transformed by Information, 290. For a similar conclusion, see Castells, Network Enterprise, 32. “For the first time in human history,” Castells postulated, in surveying the technological transformations of the recent past, “the human mind is a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of the production system.” For a critique of this view, see Greenberg, Dolores, “Energy, Power, and Perceptions of Social Change in the Early Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 95 (June 1990): 693–714CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence, vol. 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 177–8Google Scholar. See also Giddens's, Power, Property, and the State, vol. 1 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), 169–176Google Scholar. Historians share Giddens's fascination with the nineteenth-century origins of present-day information technologies. For example, in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray credit Victorian mathematician and economist Charles Babbage with having envisioned a machine that embodied “almost all the important functions of the modern digital computer.” The Mark I, the early computer that IBM built at Harvard under the supervision of Howard H. Aiken during the Second World War, was, they concluded, fairly described as “Babbage's Dream Come True.” Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 54, 76.

21 Giddens, Nation-State and Violence, 174–75. For an extreme statement of this view, see Webster, Frank, Theories of the Information Society (London, 1995Google Scholar). The “informatisation” of society, Webster contended, has been going on for several centuries, and has not changed in the past few decades in any fundamental way. From Webster's standpoint, today's information networks are little more than minor variants on the postal system, the telegraph, and the telephone. “From at least the early days of the postal service,” he added, “through to telegram and telephone facilities, much economic, social, and political life is unthinkable without the establishment of such information networks. Given this long-term dependency and incremental, if accelerated, development, why should it be that in the 1980s commentators began to talk in terms of ‘information societies’?” (p. 20).

22 Roszak, Theodore, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, 2nd. ed. (Berkeley, Calif, 1994), 19Google Scholar. For an elaboration of this position—which, in large measure, represented a response to central themes of Daniel Bell's Coming of Post Industrial Society (1973)—see Jorge Reina Schement, “The Origins of the Information Society in the United States: Compering Visions,” in Salvaggio, Jerry L., The Information Society: Economic, Social, and Structural Issues (Hillsdale, N. J., 1989), 29–50Google Scholar.

23 Roszak, Cult of Information, 29. For a somewhat different critique of the “information age” concept, see Paul E. Ceruzzi's History of Modern Computing. In this work, Ceruzzi denied that the present is an “information age,” since, in his view, the past few decades have been transformed not by information, but by computing (pp. 2–3). Ceruzzi also challenged the related notion—which had been prominently featured in the “Information Age” exhibit at the Smithsonian—that the Internet represented the “marriage” between communications and computing. On the contrary, Ceruzzi characterized the Internet as “yet another takeover, by digital computing, of an activity (telecommunications) that had a long history based on analog techniques” (p. 309).

24 Chandler, “Computer Industry.” 37.

25 See, for example, Bob Metealfe, “A Look Back at a Revolution of Communications and Where It Has Brought Us Today,” Infoworld, 27 Dec. 1999–23 Jan. 2000, 76.

26 For a related discussion, see Richard R. John, “Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age,” in Chandler and Cortada, Nation Transformed by Inforviation, 55–105, and John, , “The Politics of Innovation,” Daedalus 127 (Fall 1998): 187–214Google Scholar.

27 On SAGE, see Hughes, Thomas P., Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects that Changed the Modern World (New York, 1998Google Scholar), ch. 2.

28 Mowery, David C., “The Computer Software Industry,” in Mowery, David C. and Nelson, Richard R., eds., Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), 147CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the influence of antitrust prosecution on the early history of the software industry, see also Chandler, “Computer Industry,” 61. For a perspective closer to Campbell-Kelly's, see Liebowitz, Stan J. and Margolis, Stephen E., Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology (Oakland, Calif., 1999Google Scholar).

29 See, for example, Galambos, Louis, America at Middle Age: A New History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1983), 16Google Scholar. “The contrast between our history before 1900 and after that date could hardly more complete,” Galambos declared. In the colonial era and nineteenth century, Americans aggressively expanded their territorial domain; in the twentieth century, in contrast, they settled down to enjoy the fruits of a “far-reaching capitalist order.” In this schema, the period prior to the 1880s is notable primarily for the absence of bureaucracy—and, by implication, of the infrastructures that bureaucracy helped to sustain. Only after the 1880s, the period with which Galambos is primarily concerned, would bureaucracies become, in his view, the single most significant phenomena in American history. On this point, see Galambos, Louis, The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880–1940: A Quantitative Study in Social Change (Baltimore, 1975), 3Google Scholar. The rhetorical question in the title of my essay is a tribute, and a rejoinder, to Galambos's celebrated quip that the United States in the twentieth century has been on a “rendezvous” with bureaucracy. Galambos, Louis, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Gordon, Robert J., “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” Working paper 7833 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

31 For an exploration of this concept in the context of the infrastructural development of a nineteenth-century American city, see Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.