Chapter Four

Communications is Fundamental

• Shapes us and our organizations
• Each medium enables new
  • knowledge Structures & systems
  • Computer-based Communications will be no exception
  • What are some of the stories we already know?
    • And what can we learn from them?

Examples from History

• Oral tradition gives way to the clay tablet
  • City states, commerce, code of law
• Scroll to Codex
• Fall of Rome ~450
  • Collapse of a Communication system
  • 1000 Years
  • Castles, Monasteries and Latin-net
  • Why called the Dark Ages?

Power of Ideas & Communications

• The Renaissance began 150+ yrs before Gutenburg
• Arabic translations of Classical Greek texts arrive
  • Paris & London
    • via North Africa and Spain
• High Renaissance
  • Greek literature arrives in Greek
    • Paris & London

In the Beginning ...

[all stories begin this way]

in a few monasteries, there were many monks creating manuscripts. Then, in 1456 or so, a wine press was repurposed as a printing press. The monks were disintermediated, knowledge was diffused further and deeper, and nothing was ever the same again.

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