The Digital Flood: The Diffusion of Information Technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia by James W. Cortada (review)

Over the past decade, historian and business consultant James Cortada has produced an impressive body of work that addresses the history of computing and information technologies in the United States. His most recent book, The Digital Flood, dramatically expands the focus to include not just the American story but also western and eastern Europe as well as Asian countries like India, Japan, and China. This ambitious task is driven by a basic question: What was it about information technologies "that caused so many managers and public officials to embrace it?" (p. ix). The result is a detailed global history of computing, in turns both multinational as well as transnational.

Cortada focuses largely on a half-century that began roughly in the mid-1940s. This, he explains, is where one finds the origins of "Wave One" of information technologies (IT). This era, as he defines it, was marked by features such as the development of computers, extensive government investment in IT, and widespread consumer use of devices like personal computers and video games. His narrative—readable yet lengthy and occasionally repetitive—takes one through several different industrial eras as the "electronic data processing" of the 1960s gave way to "management information systems" in the late 1970s. Not all countries experienced Wave One at the same time, the book argues, yet this first phase positioned countries for the widespread appearance of wireless networks and internet usage that help identify Cortada's Wave Two. One cannot help but sense shades of Thomas Hughes-style technological momentum here, but operating on a far vaster scale.

Technological diffusion provides the primary intellectual underpinning of Cortada's book. As such, the title refers not to "information deluges" and the relatively recent emergence of "Big Data" methodologies but rather the flood of information machines that spread far and fast around the globe. This makes the book inherently a story of economics as well as technological innovation. As a result, Cortada draws on work by scholars such as Everett M. Rogers and Richard R. Nelson as well as those researchers who imagine innovation occurring in Kondratieff-like "long waves" during which "diffusion" and "deployment" occur (p. 29).Not all historians may be sympathetic to such broad-brushstroke invocations of "wave theories" to explain historical change, but such macro-focused tools are useful for a history that covers such a wide swath of time and geography. However, it would have been interesting to see Cortada acknowledge or expand on the metaphorical comparisons between hisWaves One and Two and the prevalent use of "generations" that marked much computing discourse in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Japan's much-heralded decision in the early 1980s to start a Fifth Generation program).

Cortada adopts Rogers's definition of diffusion as the process through which "innovation is communicated . . . among members of a social system" (p. 31). The downside of such an approach, however, is that it tends to limit analysis to members of discrete and somewhat rarefied communities such as the business leaders of IT companies, the policy makers who adopted their products, and the economists who studied the resulting effects. Consequently, this book leaves less room for the daily users of information technologies. Cortada does give attention to IT consumers but their main agency is mostly to buy or not to buy. Similarly, people and organizations who sat closer to the margins of the computing ecosystem receive less examination. There is not much room for denizens of Homebrew Computer Club here, while visionaries like Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson don't appear. (To be fair, celebrity industrialists like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs barely get a nod either.)

Historians of technology will be pleased to see that Cortada identifies a range of reasons for how and why information technologies diffused from the United States to other countries and regions. Macroeconomic conditions as well as...