The Story of Information

In 1772, the town of Boston established a Committee of Correspondence as an agency to organize a public information network in Massachusetts; the Committee drafted a pamphlet and a cover letter which it circulated to 260 Massachusetts towns and districts, instructing them in current politics and inviting each to express its views publicly; in each town, community leaders read the pamphlet aloud and the town’s people discussed, debated, and chose a committee to draft a response which was read aloud and voted upon. When 140 towns responded and their responses published in the newspapers, “it was evident that the commitment to informed citizenry was widespread and concrete.” — Richard D. Brown, “Early American Origins of the Information Age,” in Chandler and Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information, 2000

“This new, exponentially expanding world of information technologies is now creating permanent instability inside former stable political arrangements.  This stuff disrupts everything it touches. It overturned the entire music industry, and now it is doing the same to established political systems… Barack Obama and the Democrats just got hit with the same disruptive force in the U.S.” –Daniel Henninger, “Stability’s End,” The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2011

More on the Internet and tyrants here

“When a telegraph network spanned the globe, war would be no more, and cannonballs and mortars would be locked up in museums as curiosities and remnants of a barbarous age” —New York Herald, July 12, 1846

“Every message [the telegraph line connecting England to France] transmits makes stronger by one thread the band which war will have to cut” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, 1856

“The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.”  –Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat, 2005

“This generation will determine if the world can avoid the apocalypse that will come if the fear-ridden establishments continue to dominate global politics, motivated by terror, armed with nukes, and playing old but now far too dangerous games. This generation will not bypass existing institutions and methods: look at the record turnout in Iran and the massive mobilization of the young and minority vote in the US. But they will use technology to displace old modes and orders.” –Andrew Sullivan, “The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” June 13, 2009