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I want to introduce Information Technology as a concept distinct from mechanical technology. It follows different rules and when Information Technology and Mechanical Technology come together in the form of Information Machines such as clocks and computers, magical and terrible things can happen.

It’s no secret that the turning point in (some people argue the beginning of) the development of information technologies was the invention of moveable type. But whether moveable type took a long time in coming or turned out to be a revolution in information technology, one thing is certain. It didn’t happen because people needed the technology. It happened because people needed the information. The printing press is not a very complicated piece of machinery. In Europe printing presses had been used for a very long time already printing block items like playing cards. Versions of what became the Gutenberg press existed in China and Korea in the twelfth century. So why didn’t the Chinese or Koreans start printing books by the bushel full like the Europeans eventually did, and why did the Europeans take so long to start doing it themselves?

The reason is simple. The technology was there but the need wasn’t. Information was used differently than it is today and spreading it around to as many people as possible wasn’t one of the things that made it useful. As a matter of fact, it was quite the opposite.

Let’s talk briefly about the Chinese. The Chinese alphabet is graphical in that characters do not represent sounds. They represent meanings. Consider the name of one of the books that most influenced Chinese culture and the characters that make up the title - Dao De Jing.

The Dao De Jing explains how all things come together successfully when they follow a predefined path. If people choose to live in keeping with this direction, everything goes smoothly. When they go against it, things go bad. Each of the characters in this title represents a word in which the etymology is already built in. In other words, it’s a picture of a word and the picture gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Each of the elements of the picture contributes to the meaning. It’s a very complex process that results in an alphabet of 40,000 characters. That’s a lot of movablemoveable type to keep track of.

When you arrange the letters used in western languages into words, the appearance of the resulting word on the page has nothing to do with its meaning. It has to do with its sound. The word “god” on the printed page is the same as “dog” except the letters are arranged differently to make a word that sounds differently. That’s when it takes on meaning. It takes a lot fewer letters to represent every sound a person can make than it does to represent every idea a person can have, which is what Chinese does.

So why didn’t those in the Orient who used object based writing not create a new alphabet? They did in Korea. But the people who could use it already had all the information they needed and they didn’t want anyone else to have any. Social status was largely dependent on education which required a mastery of this very complicated system of writing and most of the good stuff was still in Chinese. No one wanted to give that up and everyone who could read and write was very concerned about what would happen if they lost their written language or if others could learn how to use it.

The same thing happened in Europe. The power of the church depended on controlling the flow of information and two things changed all that – the need for a skilled workforce after the Black Death, and the Reformation.