Anthropology and the Third Information Revolution

Abstract

This journal, Visual Anthropology, has now been in existence for a third of a century, and so it is an appropriate moment to look back at where we and our scholarship have come from, and what changes we have seen during our own lifetimes. This article first gives a rapid overview of the four major forms of information technology in human history. These were the age of oral transfer of messages, writing, printing, and lastly the age of mechanical reproduction, including the development of digital technologies. The rest of the article recalls the author’s own experience of the most recent period of computer and multi-media work. The first phase of this was the computer revolution from the 1960s to around the Millennium, the second is the spread of the high-speed internet with the accompanying tools on the web. The article ends by considering some of the implications for anthropology of the accumulated developments, in terms of on-line databases, digital repositories and personal publishing. Anthropology has been transformed during the author’s lifetime by the rapid growth of more powerful tools of communication, and it is likely that this will increase exponentially into the future. As anthropologists we need to see the big picture of how this has happened and what its implications are.