The Invisible Revolution that's in Plain Sight

"Knowledge makes resources mobile." - Peter Drucker

last updated on December 15, 2002

Yeah, right, you say. Russ playing with words again.
Well, yeah, that's what I do.
(Doesn't mean it isn't true, you decide. :)

Consider Gutenburg. Consider how beech transforms to book (beechwood tablets to records to bound record). Or consider rush reed to papyrus scrolls to paper. Or the ancient town of Pergamum in western Turkey where they used the skin of sheep for writing on (parchment). And vellum arriving from Old French veel (calfskin). If I'm not mistaken, Gutenburg and his press led to an upswing in rag collection - the quality of linen paper still tends to be described by its rag content. The link between letter:symbol and letter:document goes back to the beginning -so that intertwine of literacy and literature is as two sides of one coin.

That ability to record thoughts, events, agreements and then recite:replay them is a considerable source of power. Information power. And Gutenberg made that mobile. As I recall, the term paperback came quickly into use once there was reliable, economic bookmaking.

We have spent extraordinary efforts to spread literacy - expertise with letters. A skill that can be observed. And the information gained may peek out but is largely invisible unless one is literate. One could:can walk about with a paperback book and that source:resource of information is invisible. Short of inspecting it - at least scanning the cover's title, author and blurbs - what information it contains is invisible even if you know the person has it. (of course, having it is not the same as having the power embedded in it - but more on that in a moment).

Much is rightly made of our human abilities which lets us build what we describe and celebrate as culture and science. We live among the fruits of those abilities. They seem visible. The fruits are visible but the creation, the manipulation they arise from is invisible thought and are only hinted at in the way we lay out the letters. They lay quiet and invisible unless someone reads - rediscovers the information - and reconstitutes, recreates or extra-creates what the information makes possible. Information can become visible. That is what letters:symbol:document allow. If...

The term educate came into the English language in the 15th century with its origin being a Latin term meaning to "bring up, rear" and a related term meaning to "lead out." To bring up and draw out seems to ring true, does it not?

And that education has been focused on literacy - the capture, storage and release of information - and the manipulation of that information. Knowledge.

The power of Gutenburg's invention spread that information before whoever "could." The word know came into English use in the 11th century and links back to an Indo-European term from which we also get can, ken, cognition, incognito and diagnosis. The -ledge is likely from -lock which indicates action or process (e.g. wedlock). Knowledge is a verb. It is the invisible ability to transform visible information into visible, educated result. And it is intimately intwined with technical (17th century) from Greek term for "skill, art, craft, trade" that likely comes from an Indo-European term for "shape, make." Architect, technique, technology and text come by various paths from the same source words.

There's a funny thing about the fusion of technology and culture. It has been a part of human experience since that first cave painter, but we've had a hard time seeing it until now. When James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922 and revolutionized all of our expectations about how books should work, was he so different from Gutenberg himself? You couldn't see it at the time, but Joyce was a highly skilled technician, tinkering around with a bookmachine, making it do things it had never done before. His contemporaries saw him as an artist (or a pornographer, depending on who you talked to), but from our vantage point, he could just as easily be a programmer, writing code for the printing press platform. Joyce wrote software for hardware originally conjured up by Gutenberg. Reverse the angle, and the analogy holds as well: Gutenberg's reworking of the existing manuscript technology of quills and scribes was a creative act as profound as Molly Bloom's final monologue from Ulysses. Both innovations came from startling imaginative leaps, and both changed the way we look at the world. Gutenberg built a machine that Joyce souped up with some innovative programming, and Joyce hollered out a variation on a theme originally penned by Gutenberg himself. They were both artists. They were both engineers. Only the four hundred years that separated them kept their shared condition from view.

INTERFACE CULTURE: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

by Steven Johnson, 1997, HarperCollins Publishers

And here we find the lens to make the invisible visible - that funny thing about the fusion of technology and culture. But how do we hold that lens? Some speak of a digital divide, a chasm between those with access to information and those without access. Some see that divide as a "lost in the woods" barrier to be removed with an introduction to maps and map reading classes. Others place a socio-political motive behind the barrier.

The “digital divide” is a phrase that represents the crisis that occurs when certain groups have become disenfranchised or alienated from society as a whole because of the way others have used or controlled technology and the flow of information. The American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy has defined the digital divide as:

Differences based on race, gender, geography, economic status and physical ability: in access to information, the Internet and other information technologies and services; in skills, knowledge, and abilities to use information, the Internet and other technologies. (American Library Association)

It must be recognized that the digital divide runs much deeper than the barriers set between the poor and their access to the Internet. This simplification is a common fallacy that must be recognized if there is to be a practical plan for the future. The digital divide is constructed of many different facets, each of which is entrenched in the other; each of which cannot be solved without looking at the larger picture. This cannot be understood without first examining the historical context of the barriers to electronic information.

Crossing the Great Divide: A Challenge to Libraries in the Digital Age, by Geoffrey S. Harder
Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility, LIS 582, Dr. Toni Samek
School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta, April 11, 2001

But, very likely, much of the digital divide derives from how different people think about the world and where it is headed (where they wish it to go).

The psychological impact of the Information Revolution, like that of the Industrial Revolution, has been enormous. It has perhaps been greatest on the way in which young children learn. Beginning at age four (and often earlier), children now rapidly develop computer skills, soon surpassing their elders; computers are their toys and their learning tools. Fifty years hence we may well conclude that there was no "crisis of American education" in the closing years of the twentieth century -- there was only a growing incongruence between the way twentieth-century schools taught and the way late-twentieth-century children learned. Something similar happened in the sixteenth-century university, a hundred years after the invention of the printing press and movable type.

Beyond the Information Revolution, by Peter F. Drucker, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1999

What may be clear is the change in learning. What may not be clear, in fact is often the source of resistance, is the shift away from the traditional sense of "literacy" - expertise with letters:symbol:document in the sense of two dimensional text. In the digital framework, anything representable can become symbolized (abstracted into a process or idea-object) and then manipulated within a digital "document." It is, in simple, incomplete terms, the shift from linear text documents to non-linear, multi-model documents. Over a decade ago, I worked with a financial programmer who would look at a problem set (take these available assets and figure out how to use them to arrive at this favorable outcome) and then close his eyes and, um, compute. I had the sense he actually "saw" graphs as he played with formulas in his head, trying them out for a fit with the resources and the outcome desired - that he "drew" in his mind various non-linear interactions over time until he found one that sort of fit the desired outcome. He'd then sit at the keyboard and code the algorithms that he saw then run the program and see what it charted, tinker until optimized. A book might describe all the parts but it isn't going to show you how they dynamically interact. We have "documents" that can do that now.

The one thing (to say it again) that is highly probable, if not nearly certain, is that the next twenty years will see the emergence of a number of new industries. At the same time, it is nearly certain that few of them will come out of information technology, the computer, data processing, or the Internet. This is indicated by all historical precedents.

Beyond the Information Revolution, by Peter F. Drucker, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1999

That dynamic "literacy" is what is invisible. That invisibility leaves many ignorant of what is possible or how to get "there" from "here" once it is realized. We can only educate, "lead out," to make the path visible.

history of words resource: Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins - the histories of more than 8,000 English-language words by John Ayto, 1990, Arcade Publishing