Written interaction, while powerful in and of itself, takes on greater significance when combined with another significant change in communication brought about by the communication revolution: long-distance many-to-many communication. For thousands of years, the only forums of many-to-many communication were the village meeting, town hall, and town square. In the twentieth century, new forms of communication such as the telephone conference call and ham radio were added to the range of “interactive broadcasting” technologies available to people, but since these were based on small, bounded numbers of oral networks, they failed to have a large social impact. In contrast, many-to-many computermediated communication can draw thousands of people into a single discussion, and millions of people around the world are now communicating online. While this has a potentially significant impact on almost every walk of life, from business (e-commerce) to romance (online chat and dating) to politics (public debate and grassroots organizing), one of the most profound effects is in the area of scholarship. Even before the full-blown Internet explosion of the 1990s, Stevan Harnad reported how scholarly skywriting—online exchange among scholars and scientists—was starting to reshape scientific inquiry. This exchange—which can take place via personal e-mail, specialized online scholarly forums, the online posting and archiving of works in progress and prepublication offprints, and electronic journals with much faster manuscript-to-published-document turn-arounds than paper journals— is speeding up and democratizing the means of production of knowledge. A century ago, a scientific breakthrough might have gone relatively unnoticed for months or years. Today, that same discovery can be known all over the world in a short time, and other scientists can ground their own existing and future research in these new findings without having to wait for the study to be written up and published in a print journal.
Digital World, Digital Technology and Formation of Information Society
