Since we can't evaluate our own era with the detachment afforded by some future vantage point, we have no choice but to look back in time. Fortunately, history shows how society was remade by three previous Information Revolutions, each of which allowed our ancestors to better exploit their unique biological capability.
What is the capability that distinguishes humans from all other animals? It's certainly not tool-making. Many animals use simple tools. Chimpanzees, for example, use long sticks to pluck juicy termites from their mounds. It's not language either. Bottlenosed dolphins speak, though we have yet to decode their clicks and whistles.
To appreciate our uniqueness and its relationship with information technology, consider one of evolution's greatest puzzles. For at least 60,000 years our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, lived side-by-side with the Neanderthals, our closest biological cousins. Though usually depicted as dim-witted brutes, artifacts dug up from Neanderthal encampments reveal a sophisticated, tool-making people who undoubtedly used language and possessed brains significantly larger than our own. They flourished for a quarter million years, but then, about 30,000 years ago, they disappeared.
From evidence presented by archaeologist Alexander Marshack, it seems that the Neanderthal's extinction may be linked to humanity's first Information Revolution. Like other researchers, Marshack was long fascinated by mysterious markings etched onto a three-inch long fragment of reindeer antler. Eventually, he concluded that the symbols, twenty-eight to a set, perfectly matched the phases of the moon.
Nearly twice as old as the famous cave paintings of Lascaux, Marshack's 32,000 year-old lunar calendar is the earliest known example of our species' unique ability to convert ideas into strings of written symbols. By virtue of some evolutionary accident, the human brain is "wired" for literacy. The complete absence of written symbols or representational art at Neanderthal sites suggests that even our closest evolutionary cousins lacked this capacity.
To hunt bison, elk, and red deer with primitive stone-tipped weapons, our ancestors often attacked at river crossings, where the migrating herds were most vulnerable. One can imagine how valuable hand-held lunar calendars would have been to widely-scattered bands trying to intercept these herds. When bitterly harsh Ice Age winters heightened the struggle for scarce resources, our ancestors benefited from an information technology inaccessible to their primary ecological competitors, the Neanderthals.
Along with the demise of our species' last rival, the first Information Revolution of 32,000 years ago also marked the beginning of continuous human innovation. Though anatomically modern homo sapiens have been around for roughly 200,000 years, up until the invention of the first notational system, we had failed to produce sustained improvements in stone-tools, art, or trade. Since the first Information Revolution, human innovation has not ceased.
During the second Information Revolution, information technology and economic life became even more intimately interrelated. About 10,000 years ago, across the Middle East, hunter/gatherer bands began settling down to raise cereal crops. At Tell Mureybet in Syria, at the excavation level of the earliest known farming village, archaeologists found evidence of three previously unseen phenomena: a quantum leap in the cereal pollen in the soil, an explosion of the human population, and the appearance of large quantities of small clay objects.
The connection between the surge in the food supply and the population explosion is self-evident. But for decades, researchers were baffled by the clay objects (cones, spheres, cylinders, pyramids, disks, etc.). Most assumed they were toys or ornamental beads. But after years of research, University of Texas archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat pieced together a far more compelling story.
Like their modern counterparts, prehistoric farmers needed to keep track of their goods. The clay objects were tokens used in accounting. A cylinder, for example, stood for a sheep; a sphere for a bushel of wheat. Quite often tokens were stuffed inside clay envelopes and used for bills of lading. When a distant buyer received a shipment of wheat, he would smash open the clay envelope to check the number of bushels against the number of tokens.
To simplify matters, innovators began pressing tokens into the surface of the wet clay envelope before it was sealed. As this became commonplace, packing tokens inside envelopes became superfluous. The information was conveyed by the impressions on the envelope's surface. Three-dimensional objects had evolved into two-dimensional symbols. Marked but empty clay envelopes soon turned into clay tablets, and clay tokens disappeared from usage. Much the same process is underway today as computer screens are festooned with icons of familiar objects like trash cans and file folders. Convenient symbols supplant clumsy objects.
By about 5000 years ago in Sumeria (now southern Iraq), the symbols inscribed on clay tablets had evolved into humanity's first full-fledged writing system. Translations of tablets discovered in the ruins of the world's first large cities show that 99% of all documents were accounting records. This should come as no surprise. Without documents to keep track of who owed who how much, broken oral promises would have led to endless disputes and social chaos. Complex human organizations, whether ancient cities or modern corporations, simply cannot exist without documents.
Except for the replacement of clay tablets by papyrus and then paper, our methods of handling information remained largely unchanged until Johann Gutenberg launched the third Information Revolution in 1452. Though still underappreciated by most historians, Gutenberg's invention of movable type printing made possible both the rise of modern science and the Machine Age.
Before printing, skilled copyists produced every single book, keeping them terribly expensive. Consequently, only a tiny fraction of society had access to books and learned to read. By stripping nearly all the labor out of copying, the printing press cut the cost of information 1000-fold within 50 years of Gutenberg's breakthrough. Pamphlets and books became cheap commodities. Literacy exploded. Modern history began.
By 1500, printing had unleashed the Scientific Revolution. Gallileo, Bacon, and Kepler all stressed printing's crucial role in enabling the explosion of scientific knowledge. For the first time, scholars could build upon the work of distant colleagues. When libraries burned, the knowledge they housed was not lost, because many other copies existed elsewhere.
In time, printing also made possible the Industrial Age. Craftsmen can be shown how to make simple tools, but complex machinery always requires blueprints and operating manuals. By the 1850s, four centuries after Gutenberg, printing's promise was fully realized as railroad networks transformed the Agricultural Age into the Machine Age.
With the microprocessor's invention in 1971, we launched the fourth Information Revolution. Now we employ the ultimate in symbolic elegance, 1s and 0s, to encode bewilderingly complex information. We etch those symbols onto silicon slivers and magnetic media instead of reindeer antlers, clay, or paper. In an instant, we copy them almost without effort or cost. As a result, humanity's stockpile of knowledge is expanding at a pace never imagined.
By exploiting our unique biological potential for literacy, the first Information Revolution turned scattered bands of scavengers into coordinated clans of hunters. The second made possible the villages and cities of the Agricultural Age. The third led to science, industry, and the nation-states of the Machine Age. And this, the fourth Information Revolution, is creating the electronic global village of the Information Age.
The consequences of the three previous Information Revolutions suggest that we are, if anything, underestimating just how revolutionary our era is. Each of the first two Information Revolutions took several thousand years to unfold. Four centuries and twenty generations passed between Gutenberg's invention and the world's first railroad networks, printing's most powerful economic manifestation.
But just 22 years after the microprocessor's invention, the global electronic network is beginning to remake daily life. For the first time in human existence, a single generation -- this generation -- must cope with the wholesale transformation of society. For today's business leaders, this means creating organizations able to harness information technology well enough to avoid the fate of the Neanderthals.