Abstract

Information has suddenly emerged from its invisibility. Like the man who discovered that he was speaking prose and that he had been speaking prose all his life, we now see something that has been true all along -- that information control, ownership and technology is important to how our world works. We know that looking at history using different lenses gives us a different perspective. We look at economic history, military history, political history, the history of women, and religious history. This presentation uses the lens of information to look at history. To classify time periods and cultures by their relation to information, the simplest way is to specify the dominant information technology and to look at access to that technology and its products. A case study is the rise and fall of the nation state. We all know we are in an information revolution. Others and I have been proclaiming the introduction of the global or regional state. The rise of the nation state followed the introduction of the press. The first conglomerate states arose with the invention of the telegraph -- the various empires. The first conglomerate nation state arose out of a civil war -- the United States -- followed by the USSR . However, what if our scenario is wrong? What if the analogy should be the fall of the Roman Empire? What if the dissolution of the USSR was the first dissolution ? How would we know ? This presentation will present some ways we can begin to think about these questions
 

Biography

Dr. Elin Whitney-Smith has studied at universities ranging from Maine to California and in fields ranging from management to geobiology. She received her Ph.D from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She now works on developing applications of the internet.