Not Gutenberg Gutenberg put several important pieces together in a new way in 1439(ish) when he built what most of us probably think of as… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
Sorry to email subscribers receiving this twice due to a scheduling error. The extra bit at the bottom is interesting! The previous post in this… Read More »Technology (16): Clustering Technologies, Clustering People (v2)
This extract comes from a much longer piece on Jerry Neumann’s blog, Reaction Wheel. Highly recommended. A Technological System is a set of technologies that… Read More »Technology (15): Jerry Neumann on technological systems and constellations of innovations
The development of spoken language was humankind’s first great networking technology.* Speech allows us to communicate thought and to think far better than we could… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought
… for me, the only real case, or the only real evidence for what a world without technology looks like is the past and the… Read More »Technology (14): Only Forward? Kevin Kelly on tech and cities as possibility factories
This is an extract from Douglas Rae’s lecture Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and an Economic System Incapable of Coming to Rest, which unpacks some of… Read More »Technology (13): Marx, Schumpeter, Howard Head’s Tennis Racquet, and how the world melts
This post contains a few snapshots from a post by Jerry Neumann (The Deployment Age) and a great overview on the Death and Birth of… Read More »Technology (12): Rise and Fall, Part 2
Why is the transition from one techno-economic system to another so disruptive for companies and individuals? On rookies and old pros We know that it… Read More »Technology (11): The World Turned Upside Down; or, the rise and fall of techno-economic regimes
If you haven’t come across it yet, Jeremy Norman‘s HistoryOfInformation.com is absolutely tremendous. It contains “more than 5,000 illustrated entries covering a diverse range of… Read More »Technology (10): a historyofinformation
Writing History by Messing Around As far as we know, writing has been invented four times in human history. The big four are Sumerian cuneiform,… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun