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Technology and Culture 42.4 (2001) 774-776



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A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present


A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. Edited by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+380. $39.95.

For some time, the term "Information Age" and the idea that it has replaced the Industrial Age have been commonplaces among journalists, economists, and social scientists. What is new is the recognition that the Information Age and the information systems that comprise it date back at least to the eighteenth century. Historians are finally beginning to use information as a lens with which to analyze the past. This book is indicative of that trend.

The central theme of A Nation Transformed by Information is the creation of new information systems and devices and their rapid adoption by American society. Authors stress the enthusiasm with which Americans [End Page 774] sought and greeted new information systems even before the founding of the United States. They focus on the successful technologies and the businesses that made the best use of them. The only failures described in any detail are those of Western Union and RCA, which had long and successful lives at the forefront of one technological system but missed out when the next one came along. In short, this book celebrates technology, business, and progress. Some readers will find it too deterministic and triumphalist, while others will welcome it as an antidote to social constructivism.

As is true of most collections of works by different authors, the tone and focus of the essays varies greatly. Richard Brown's "Early American Origins of the Information Age" stresses the uniquely American phenomenon of an informed citizenry and its demand for printed matter. Richard John's "Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age" is a lucid account of the expansion of communications from the eighteenth-century postal system to the creation of the long-distance telephone network on the eve of World War I. JoAnne Yates's "Business Use of Information and Technology during the Industrial Age" describes the mechanical and electromechanical systems that businesses adopted in order to record, store, retrieve, analyze, and communicate information internally in the period from 1880 to 1950. Margaret Graham's "The Threshold of the Information Age: Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures Mobilize the Nation" praises the vacuum tube as the defining technology that created the mass media and popular culture before 1950. James Cortada's "Progenitors of the Information Age: The Development of Chips and Computers" also concentrates on specific kinds of hardware and the companies that created them; unlike the other authors, who ignore the rest of the world, Cortada candidly celebrates the uniqueness and superiority of the United States. Richard Nolan's "Information Technology Management Since 1960" shows how the internal management of American businesses was twice transformed, first by large computers, then by personal computers. Lee Sproul's "Computers in U.S. Households Since 1977" looks outside the business world to the amazing and largely unexpected changes that personal computers and the Internet have brought to American homes and consumers, a revolution as profound as the advent of the automobile.

And, finally, an essay by the editors, Alfred Chandler and James Cortada, contrasts Alfred Vail's role in creating AT&T with the software industry to show how relentlessly information technologies have swept through American society and yet how different their origins can be, from major corporations to small groups of ingenious inventors.

These essays are concerned with different technologies, business organizations, and consumers, and with different periods in American history. Inevitably, there are some gaps; for example, point-to-point radio communications (overseas, maritime, aviation, military, police, taxi and truck fleets, and cellular phones) got left out, and the astonishing development of [End Page 775] the Internet cries out for more than a passing mention. But...

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