Today’s information society bespeaks a long history, exhibiting marked continuities with the past as well as some sharply defined new features. Our personal and professional social relations are significantly shaped by, and actively shape, the information flows occurring unceasingly within our midst. Yet the historical foundations of the information society remain poorly understood. The posts found within this site will provide various exploratory themes as it develops such a framework by examining emergent information institutions and practices from early modern Europe to the later 20th century. After importantly, albeit briefly, exploring indigenous voices to consider a few counterstories of societal information and knowledge processes and infrastructures, we will take a deep dive reverse engineering the dominant Western historical development of the “information society” through several important conceptual and theoretical lenses using the following guiding question:
How are societies constituted, sustained, and changed in part by information and the infrastructures that emerge to manage information access and use? (Rayward, 2013)