An Information Technology Reader · Grade 7 I&S
How Information Changed
the World
Six stories about how every new information technology — from the printing press to the smartphone — follows the same arc.
This book is built around one idea. Every information technology — every new way for humans to copy and move ideas — has followed the same three steps. It arrives as a miracle. It becomes ordinary. Eventually, someone learns how to weaponize it.
The pattern has been running for five hundred years. The chapters below trace it through six technologies that each changed who held power, what people believed, and how fast a new idea could spread.
The Through-Line
“Every new information technology starts as a miracle, becomes ordinary, and eventually gets weaponized. The pattern has been running for five hundred years.”
Miracle
A new technology arrives. Almost nobody understands it. The first people who get it feel like wizards.
Ordinary
It spreads. Costs drop. It stops being magical and becomes part of how things just work.
Weaponized
Someone figures out how to use it to manipulate, divide, or control people. Often that someone is the state.
Chapters
- Prologue The Pattern Setup
- Ch 1 A Monk, a Machine, and a Door Printing Press · 1450s–1500s
- Ch 2 The Two-Thousand-Year Speed Limit Telegraph · 1840s–1860s
- Ch 3 The Ship That Wouldn’t Listen Radio · 1900s–1940s
- Ch 4 The Camera Picks a President Television · 1950s–1990s
- Ch 5 The Typo Heard Round the World Internet · 1969–2000s
- Ch 6 Revolutions in Your Pocket Smartphones · 2007–now
- Epilogue Spotting the Pattern Payoff