Abstract
The main goal of this book is to indicate how much our understanding of contemporary world has changed together with the development of information techniques (see also Lubacz 2008) and related fields, such as mathematical computational techniques. Therefore, I start with general epistemological observations related to this change, and only later I document this change in more detail through the analysis of selected elements of recent history of information technology. Through the latter I understand the history, with the epoch of industrial civilization included, from around 1760, although clearly light signalling was known already in ancient times. As I could not present a comprehensive history (it would require much more space and time), only “elements” are presented, and obviously treated selectively. The method of selection concentrates not on technical or instrumental importance of various inventions that contribute to this history, but on their social or even conceptual importance.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, the rotary speed controller of James Watt is commented in Kopczyński (2003) with the sentence “The possibility of control of rotary speed provided an ingenious centrifugal controller” without noting its historical conceptual importance and a large number of continuators of this concept that will be discussed in Chap. 8.
- 2.
The concept of historical materialism of Karl Marx, according to which socio-economic changes are determined by the development of productive forces, must be modified after the informational revolution: equally or more important are tools commonly used by people in a given civilization epoch, and techne , the art of constructing such tools. For example, it is computers together with robots and automatic washing machines that enable nowadays the realization of the goal of full equality of women (socio-cultural changes are also needed to reach this goal, but it would be not attainable without these tools). Therefore, we should rather interpret it as a techno-cultural co-evolution. See also Sadowski (2009).
- 3.
In fact, Tofflers predicted the fall of the so-called communist system: in The Third Wave they state that robotization and automation will lead to the destruction of the class of manufacturing proletariat and that information society will develop, but it can develop only in democratic and market economy states (thus, Nasim Taleb in his book The Black Swan, 2007, is incorrect when saying that nobody predicted this fall). Ronald Reagan knew these opinions and acted by promoting high tech space weapons, thus putting a pressure on the communist system. On the other hand, from personal experience (I have promoted the idea of information society in Poland since around 1985 and obtained even the T. Hoffmokl Award for these efforts) I know that the leaders of Polish government at that time, Wojciech Jaruzelski and Mieczysław Rakowski, read the book of Tofflers, which might have helped to convince them about the need of democratization of Poland and negotiation with Solidarity movement.
- 4.
I understand the concept of megatrends slightly differently than their original definition by John Naisbit (1982) who required that megatrends should be new directions, while for me megatrends must be important social phenomena of long duration, lasting at least several decades.
- 5.
I once checked personally how voluminous are interconnect conditions of NTT (the former telecommunications monopolist in Japan): about two thousand pages.
- 6.
The European Union gives a priority to counteracting the phenomenon of digital divide and teaching the use of digital techniques. In Poland, however, the dangers of digital divide are not fully perceived, see also final chapters of this book.
- 7.
From my personal contacts I know that not all representatives of humanities accept postmodernism, thus I speak here only about a currently dominating approach in soft sciences, particularly in sociology of science.
- 8.
Particularly in fast and inadequate translation. See, e.g., (Agamben 2007), where the author used actually the concept of dispositif, but postmodernist translators into Polish used the technical word urządzenie (assembly). However, there are many more general examples, such as the sociologist use of the concept of network (a set of nodes and connections between them for a technician, a loosely defined set of people for a sociologist).
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Wierzbicki, A.P. (2015). Preface: New Epoch, It’s Conceptual Platform and Episteme. In: Technen: Elements of Recent History of Information Technologies with Epistemological Conclusions. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 71. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09033-7_2
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