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To answer this question, it is necessary to separate the information revolution 1.0 from the information revolution 2.0.

The way I see it, the First Information Revolution has indeed caused a social revolution… — but it took a very long time to do so. The First Information Revolution changed society from being primarily illiterate into what it is now. Today, reading literacy is widespread throughout most societies — but note that this was not the case less than 2 centuries ago… yet the First Information Revolution (the one that lead to widespread reading literacy) started almost 6 centuries ago. Granted, the technological invention that was probably most influential for the increase of reading literacy was not Gutenberg‘s printing press, but rather the press which enabled the mass production of print — the offset printing press, which was invented during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. This enabled a far more widespread consumption of literature than earlier printing presses, and the offset printing press is probably the first technology worthy of the predicate “mass media”.

Reading literacy was the only kind of literacy needed for this First Information Revolution, and therefore it is primarily this type of literacy that was taught in schools. With reading literacy, people can read laws, read advertisements, read opinions and those “letters to the editor” that editors were willing to publish. And it is this form of literacy that is also usually referred to when people talk of “media literacy” — such as being able to understand a radio or television program, the more favored tools of propaganda (because they are more visceral and therefore more effective for the purpose of hypnosis ).

The Second Information Revolution is based on a different kind of literacy — a productive use of language (such as spoken language), and most importantly: written language. Written language is a codification of ideas unlike other recorded expressions, because with writing, ideas are first codified in a systematic way before they are stored in the form of written records. Therefore, audio and visual recordings are rarely considered to be acts of writing, and few people would consider writing in written English to be an act of “recording”.

I will get to the reason why writing is so much more important than other methods of creating records in a moment, but first let me underscore the difference between the First Information Revolution and the Second Information Revolution once more. You might argue that if someone can write an English sentence, that might be considered to be a productive act — and it is, but merely writing something is relatively meaningless and inconsequential if no one will read it. None of the technologies of the First Information Revolution enabled normal people to make information public — during the First Information Revolution, publishing was restricted to an elite minority of people referred to as publishers (and/or broadcasters — i.e. people in the radio and/or television broadcasting industries). The right to publish was quite severely restricted and/or controlled by the government, primarily via a complicated set of systems linked to the notion of copyright. Under this system, if someone published an idea, they became entitled to “own” that particular expression of the idea for some period of time after publishing it. The primary reason this has been done is that it was a sort of promotional gimmick– because if you could own expressions, then you could “make money” by selling such expressions. This has resulted in a deluge of virtually worthless paperback expressions, which were written in the hope that maybe some sucker could be fooled into buying them and therefore be a sort of “get rich quick” scheme for smooth talkers.

Up until recently, publishing has always been more or less geographically limited. Radio signals have a rather limited reach, and it was really only the advent of satellite technology that has enabled a global reach. In any case: Publishing using any of these First Information Revolution technologies was not within the reach of most people simply because of the high cost of  — and in particular: the very large capital investment required for — publishing.

That has since changed. Today, just as anyone can walk on an ancient Roman street, just as you and I can see the stars if we walk down Hollywood Boulevard — and just as we do not have to pay any money to do so, so too we also no longer have to pay to allow bits of information to traverse the information superhighway. Of course we have to pay to buy the clothes we wear and the shoes we use to walk down the street, and likewise we have to buy the technological instruments we use to express our ideas (just as we had to buy paper and pencils in the paper-based era), but we do not have to pay for their transmission any more than we have to pay for the air we use to say to our friends “please don’t step on Greta Garbo”.

In the past years, the prices for the instruments we need to post our ideas onto the Internet (and especially on the World-Wide Web) have plummeted… — so why have we not yet experienced a social revolution of writing literacy during this Second Information Revolution that is on par with the social revolution of reading literacy which happened during the First Information Revolution? My hunch is that the publishing establishment is against the idea… — and because many other industries (and governments) have become very dependent on this publishing establishment in order to spread their establishment propaganda messages, they do not want normal people to be enabled to publish ideas that might be in competition with their own establishment ideas.

Therefore, the publishing establishment and the media industrial complex are trying to limit the freedom of expression via the Internet and the World-Wide Web. The primary way they are doing this is by limiting education in order to limit the writing literacy of most members of society. This is the only plausible reason why high school graduates, college students and even college graduates have received little or no training that would enable them to function in a media-literate society… other than to consume publications that have been sanctioned for consumption by the publishing industry establishment and the media industrial complex.

Therefore, the government-industrial establishments of the world endorse so-called “generic search engines” (such as Google in the United States, or Baidu in China, or other “generic search engines” in other countries), so that such “generic search engines” can censor the information available to the general public. Because most people are so poorly educated, they have not learned that they are in fact free to choose other information sources than the consumer propaganda machines — known to them only as “generic search engines”, or even only under their commercial brand names, which are in most cases closely affiliated with governments and government-sanctioned censors.

This situation reminds me of a case in which a woman friend-of-the-family once argued that “water doesn’t run uphill” when a neighbor had complained to her that whenever it rained, the water from her property ran down the hill and flooded his property. Likewise, Galileo is purported to have said “and still it moves” when he was forced to renounce the heliocentric theories he had been trying to defend for his entire life. If people build on shaky foundations, then the ideas they construct on top of such shaky foundations will eventually crumble, break and fall down.

This brings me to the final point. The Internet is a network of computers — and computers are machines that can process data very efficiently if (and only if) the data have been systematically organized. This is why the use of written languages (such as written English) are so important for computers to be effective tools of communication in this new era. During the First Information Revolution, consumers could be mesmerized by publishers. During the Second Information Revolution, all people who are literate in the Wisdom of the Language will be able to “cut through the crap”… and cut straight to the chase — but if they wait for someone else to help them learn how to do that, then that may very well take several centuries, not just a couple years.

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