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Unit-1-Information-Technology-Revolution.pdf
Global Society

1º Global Society

Grado en Global Studies

Facultad de Derecho
Universidad de Salamanca

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UNIT 1. THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION. Manuel Castells’

Theory.
“The history of life is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major
events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era…” These
major events are what we call Revolutions.

The Information Technology Revolution is a process that started in the last quarter of the 20th
century. Its core is technologies of information processing and communication. New products
based in the transformation of information (electronics, computing, telecommunication,
broadcasting) were invented and eventually introduced in the market. A constellation of major
technological breakthroughs around information technology took place on the last 2 decades
of the 20th century  lots of different areas of knowledge were connected by information

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technology, and new areas were created. The process of technological transformation expands
exponentially.

This Revolution is the major event of the last century and it is pervasive to every area of
human activity, as all revolutions are.

 A Revolution is a break on gradualism: it changes society, economics, and production…

in a very short time.

Users of this new developed technology are the ones that change the way it works. The
development of new devices and tech is shaped by people. This way, what characterizes this
Revolution is not new knowledge but the loop between introducing new tech, using it and
developing it into new realms  much faster in the new technological paradigm. These new
technologies are not tools to be applied but processes to be developed. Users and doers are
the same people.

An additional characteristic that differences Information Technology Revolution from their

historical predecessors is the geographical distribution of information technology. The last
Revolutions expanded too, but not equally to every country (not every country owned an
industrial infrastructure). But in this Information Technology Revolution the diffusion has
been global within two decades.

o But not everybody uses this tech in Africa, Asia…? Not everybody has access, not
even in developed countries, but still it is a global phenomenon, with different
diffusion speed.
o The different speeds accentuate the gap between developed and not that
developed countries. The massive spread of the info still creates isolated
communities  contradiction.
o The diffusion of this tech bases in information: information is expanded in a way
that made an exponential growth possible. This way, by the end of 20th century the
world was connected in a new network of information despite some resistances to
the spread of this technology.

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1. About other Revolutions: The Industrial Revolutions.

The First Industrial Revolution occurred during the last 3rd of the 18th century, and it
brought new manufacturing techniques. Machine tools were developed, the steam
machine was invented and that lead to the factory system.

One hundred years later the Second Industrial Revolution came to happen: electricity,
chemicals, internal combustion engines, telegraph and phone (the first information
technologies). This one bases on scientific knowledge.
Characteristics of these Revolutions:
1. Accelerating and unprecedented technological change by historical standards.
They changed the location of wealth and power (redistribution) among the
elite that controlled these technologies.

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2. Geographical concentration: Britain, the USA. They needed a social
environment for innovation, ie., a geographical cluster with industries, capital
investment, institutions, investigation centers… to foster these industrial
revolutions.
3. VIP: elites learn by doing, the rest by using. Elites decided the direction of
technological changes, consumers just received the technology and got used
to it, they did not have an influence in the way this tech was shaped.
4. Positive effects: economic growth, living standards improvement, human
mastery of a hostile nature.
5. Their core: innovation in generation and distribution of energy –electricity,
vapor, etc.

2. When and where did this Revolution Start?

It was in the WWII where computers began, but in the 1970s the new information
technologies diffused widely. The three main fields of the Information Technology
Revolution were: microelectronics, computers and telecommunications.
 Regarding micro-electronics:
o The transistor was invented in 1947 – process electronic impulses in a binary
mode – coded communications between machines with 0s and 1s. (chips)
o The giant leap was in 1971 micro electronics was diffused.
o An Intel engineer invented the micro-processor making the coding process
more agile.
 Computers:
o They started in Philadelphia, sponsored by the USA army. These first
computers were big machines that worked slowly and they were used to solve
math and physics problems.
o With the invention of the microprocessor the build of a computing box was
allowed  similar to modern computers. The first microcomputer, ‘Altair’ was
created.
o New software was developed and allowed personal computers to be diffused.
Operative systems made computers user-friendly and commercial. By using
the technology, problems that it had came out and users looked for solutions.

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o Steve Jobs created the first commercial microcomputers based in the Altair.
He worked in Silicon Valley with Wozniak at the moment.
o In the 1990s there was a shift: computers were working alone until then,
focused in data storage and processing; now networks begun, interactive
computer power sharing turned into the main focus. Many computers could
be connected – still not internet.
 Telecommunications

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o Revolutionized by the combination of “node” technologies – electronic
switches and routers and new linkages (transmission technologies). 1999 –
optical fiber carry capacity was huge.
o The radio spectrum started to be used in different forms allowing mobile users
to communicate
o By the start of the 21th century the possibility of connecting to the net
wherever and whenever was being looked for. That led to the creation and
development of Internet. Internet was born from many factors:
 Militar strategy
 Big science cooperation
 Technological entrepreneurship
 Counter cultural innovation
o The origins of internet lie on the US Defense Department Advanced Research
Projects Agency – ARPA. A group of connections that were meant to move
information during the Cold War. In the end, scientific communication and
personal chatting was added to military activity at a point that they were hard
to separate. Then ARPANET separated from MILNET (used only for military
purposes) both under the control of public administration.
o By 1995 the Internet became private due to the growth of private firms,
commercial pressures and the growth of non-profit cooperatives (they looked
for a diffusion of information, knowledge, software…). Nowadays no one owns
internet, no one has being overseeing it since it was privatized.

According to Castells: it is important that many applications of internet were born because
of the activity and unexpected inventions of its first users: scientists, hackers, ect. User’s
creativity forced a change, that doesn’t happen in previous revolutions.

 Modems for computers were invented by Chicago students that wanted to share info
without travelling.
 World Wide Web invented by CERN. It organized internet content by information so it
was easier for users to find content. It was distributed for free.
 Internet browsers. Netscape navigator intended to make internet user-friendly, easy,
just as operative systems did for computers.
 These inventions related to transmission technology allowed the network to sustain
the exponential growth in the volume of communication.
o Internet philosophy includes sharing knowledge for free  constant fight with
governments.
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o In the late 1990s there were web servers al around the world (mega-computer
servers). There was an exponential growth of new devices that were
specialized in information sharing, downloading, ect.
o Finally, the mobile phone and the smartphones were created. The use of
smartphones to connect to internet has had an exponential growth in the
latest years. There is a tendency of using mobile phones instead of computers.

3. Why were this discoveries clustered in California and why in that

time?
There were the most important universities. The mentality of the east coast was
focused in this kind of business, unlike other places that saw communication and new
technologies field as a waste of time (according to Castells). Silicon Valley has a key

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role in the development of this technology because of the technology workers and
universities that were nearby. The development of these technologies didn’t respond
to any specific necessity, but to the work of the professionals around Silicon Valley.

In 1980s capitalism undertook a process of economic and organizational restructuring

based new information, which boosted the process of the revolution out of its cluster
in Silicon Valley.

Castells’ conclusion on this: The development of Information Technology Revolution

contributed to the formation of the milieux or environment of innovation where
discoveries and applications would interact and would be tested in (San Francisco bay,
Silicon Valley) and where developers of this tech interacted. A cluster of knowledge
consolidated and it attracted politicians, informatics, and investors… to Silicon Valley.
It grew up and got stronger.

4. The Information Technology Paradigm

Features:

1. Information is the raw material of this rev. Information is not just a mean to foster
progress, but the object of this transformation progress itself.
2. Pervasiveness of effects of new tech. The revolution has an impact in every field of
human activity.
3. The networking logic of any system or set of relationships. The networks allow to
increase the complexity of interaction between actors and allows to diffuse creativity
and use it to better the technology.
4. The information tech paradigm is based on flexibility: everything is flexible. This is not
always positive. For example technology sometimes makes it difficult to fully
disconnect from work.
5. The growing convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system:
different fields converged into the same: the information technology paradigm.

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