We live in a networked world. Besides our
social networks, our societal networks and our friend networks, we’re now in
the midst of networking knowledge – or as it is more conventionally known,
information networks. But while we’ve only noticed it now, our information
networks have grown progressively over millennia, and have only recently reached
a critical mass that prompted its acceleration.
Not much is known on how we first started
networking knowledge, but it was impossible before the invention of
language. Archaeologists speculate that
symbolic language was first developed by modern humans in Africa in the Middle
Stone Age about 200 000 years ago, and when they spread out from Africa
about 60 000 years ago, they carried language and symbolic culture with
them.
Language, while quite useful for
disseminating knowledge, had one major drawback – it was not recorded. Hence
why we need to rely on archaeologists to speculate about its origins, and why
that time is referred to as pre-history. But even as the spread of knowledge
was finite without a recording medium, it simply required that one push to
expand knowledge exponentially. In 4 000 BCE, in Mesopotamia (modern day
Iraq), a breakthrough occurred. For 4000 years, the Mesopotamian civilization
had used a primitive form of accounting by storing clay tokens in pots, when a
different idea began to take hold. By using a stylus, they engraved symbols on
these clay pots to indicate the tokens inside. An idea formed…
Soon they dispensed with the clay pots, for
clay tablets, and no longer would tokens be used – marks on the tablet would
suffice. Writing was invented, and this form of recording knowledge spread
throughout the region. In 2700 BCE, this cuneiform writing had spread to
ancient Egypt, and they provided the next breakthrough. The Egyptians developed
a set of 24 hieroglyphs to represent syllables of their language, and suddenly
not only amounts could be recorded, but language as well! Thoughts and ideas
previously only communicated via speech could now be preserved for future
generations, and humanity took a great leap forward. We had invented the
alphabet!
But clay tablets were brittle, and heavy –
they could not be transported safely. Luckily the Egyptians had a solution –
papyrus. Sheets of the pith of the papyrus plant could be used to write on, and
were significantly lighter, allowing them to be safely transported. Rolled up
into scrolls or bound into codices, knowledge could be preserved. Soon efforts
were made to collect and index the entire recorded knowledge of mankind, and
Pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander the Great’s successors, created the
Musaeum of Alexandria, where all the great scholars of the world studied. Their
collective knowledge was inscribed on papyrus and stored in the Great Library
of Alexandria, where up to 400 000 scrolls were stored at its height.
Unfortunately, papyrus was not particularly
durable, and this was soon evident when the Great Library was destroyed in a
fire during Julius Caesar’s siege of Alexandria in 48BCE. But what alternative
was there? An answer lurked from the East, where during the Han dynasty in
China, a new development emerged in 105 CE. The invention of paper.
Paper slowly spread west, reaching the
Middle East by 750 CE and Egypt by 900 CE. Paper has several advantages over
papyrus – not only was is more durable and lasted longer, but it was also much
thinner, and much more information could be stored in a much more compact form.
This allowed it to travel much further, allowing ideas to spread, and
significantly multiplied the amount of information that could be held in
libraries.
With the amount of information now
available, a new problem emerged though – for knowledge to be preserved, you
had to make a copy of it when you wanted to send it somewhere else. This
required laborious manual transcribing, and dramatically increased its cost. A
man named Johannes Gutenberg from Germany changed all that. His printing press
allowed knowledge to be duplicated en masse, allowing 240 pages to be printed
per hour, enabling the mass distribution of knowledge.
This distribution of knowledge was still
physical though, and it took time to distribute knowledge. In 1876 CE,
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, a method of sending information
over copper, and a short while later, in 1895 CE, Guglielmo Marconi developed
another new method of communicating information – radio. And while both were
much faster, it rendered much of our old knowledge inaccessible as it was in a
different format, and, of course, also reintroduced the age-old problem of
recording the distributed information.
Fortunately, necessity is the mother of
invention, and soon there was a need to record a lot of information coming in
for review – war. Specifically, World War II. With the radio now a battlefield
instrument relaying knowledge back to governments, a machine was required to
capture and correlate this information. A young man named Alan Mathison Turing
was working to decipher Axis cryptographic codes, and with his team, developed
an Automatic Computation Engine, the key to the Colossus computers that did the
code-breaking.
But these new-fangled ‘computers’ as they
were called were not only capable of receiving this new electronic and radio
information, it was also capable of storing it, and most importantly, capable
of making copies of that information that could be sent to other computers.
Still, they were huge, cumbersome devices that were difficult to use.
Fortunately, our previous methods of spreading information far and wide were
still working, and soon progress was made.
Given their obvious utility, research was
poured into computers, and they were made smaller, faster, and cheaper. The
technology spread, and the need arose to share information amongst these
computers – after all, a single nuclear bomb could take out one, and a nation
would lose all that stored data! The United States Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA/ARPA) decided to use the copper wire from the telephone
system, which by now had criss-crossed their nation, and connect these
computers in a ‘network’ that could not be taken down by a single failure. This
ARPAnet grew quickly from 4 computers to over 100 000 as computers started
to appear across their nation. Soon commercial entities wished to linked their
computers in as well, and ARPAnet was rebranded as the Internet.
Computers have continued to get smaller,
and today, most of us are carrying one in our pocket – one that can make calls
like Bell’s telephone, but using Marconi’s radio to communicate. And more and
more of them got connected to the Internet, which means every one of them is
capable of accessing the information stored on another anywhere on the
planet. We’ve become so adept at
networking knowledge that we now have devices in our pockets that can access to
sum total of human knowledge at the drop of a hat. Our information networks
have given us access to knowledge that used to be the preserve of kings of old,
and it is only accelerating. It is time we started treating our new-found power
with the respect it deserves.
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