Many people felt that the most significant event of the last millennium was the invention of the printing press. There is no doubt that brininging affordable literacy to the population of the world changed everything about culture and allowed Harold Innis to begin writing about the exchange of information as an economy. Innis' presentation Minerva's Owl, details Hegel's observation that we cannot recognize great changes until it is too late to alter the outcome. From Innis, it is possible to speculate that the web has eliminated barriers to publication in the same way that the printing press eliminated barriers to education and that the outcome will be every bit as profound. The web may well be every bit as significant as the printing press in determining the future of mankind.
Not the usual profile? I have always been captivated by ideas and no ideas have been more intriguing than those first voiced by Harold Innis. Reading Innis as an undergrad, is clearly the reason that 20 years later, I completed my doctorate and taught communication on college campuses.
Story Chip is the extension of thinking about communication and culture as a dynamic system that is driven by symmentropy.
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