Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Patrick Finn At first blush, it may seem that the pairing of Shakespeare and Information Technology is an odd one. That, we will find, has more to do with common misperceptions about the second item in the pairing than with any ontological truth. An examination of these two epistemological categories requires that we settle our terms before attempting to tease out any propinquitous enrichment. Following the vast majority of research, we may take Shakespeare as a known quantity. The same does not apply for the term information technology; which is deeply embedded in a network of marketing rhetoric that necessarily limits the scope of its definition. Thus, the term is both under—and over determined. In the case of the latter, it is clear that we have been promised a good deal more about recent advances in technology than they have been able to provide. In these cases, machines are marketed to a population dominated by an aging population as a means to mechanically enhance performance. As it always does when it works at its most optimal, the world of advertising first sells us the disease and then supplies the cure. In scholarly terms, it is the underdetermination of Information Technology that is of interest. Putting aside our current conflation of recent advances in computing and telecommunications, let us turn to a far more robust system of meaning making: etymology. The OED lists information technology as “the branch of technology concerned with the dissemination, processing and storage of information, especially by computers.” It seems clear that the final qualifier is as a result of the recent obsessions listed above. An examination of the chronology bears this out. At heart, information technology is about the dissemination, processing and storing information. What constitutes a computer has its own vexed history, however, since it is not part of the core definition we may leave it aside. Information, according to the same source, is an item of knowledge that in some cases may involve a verbal imperative. Technology involves a discourse or practice of delivery usually involving either the industrial or the practical arts. Thus, in its most robust sense, information technology is any discourse or practice that delivers a unit or units of knowledge. It is in this more grounded approach that we find the basis for the pairing that lends its name to this collection. Historically civilizations have risen and fallen in relation to their forms of information technology. The rhetoric of the Greek agora is one means of delivering bits of information, processing them and then storing them so that they may converted into practice—or at least into rules that were supposed to govern practice; we could say rather that they became algorithms. In this same light, theatre, which was implemented in order to test political procedures, was in one sense an early productivity matrix. Certainly, the practice of theatre is its own elaborate system of delivering, processing and storing knowledge in the public database. [End Page i] Techniques for delivering, processing and memorizing information lie at the heart of narrative. Elements such as rhyme, metaphor and alliteration demonstrate the way in which storytellers and poets used computational skills to deliver information in a pleasing way, to enhance its processing power by relating bits to one another and to find ways to make it easier for others to commit to memory. Perhaps the greatest system of information technology in the western tradition came in the memory systems of the late medieval and early renaissance traditions catalogued best by Mary Caruthers in her publication, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (CUP 2nd ed. 2008). The introduction of print technology—its own system of information technology—began the transformation of anthropocentric technologies to external storage and processing solutions. Print, with its application of arrangement, font manipulation, images and footnotes with linked bibliographies remains the single most influential transformation in the history of information technology. I have said elsewhere that we care currently living in the Second Incunabulum. The Incunabular period—that transition between manuscript and print systems—provides many lessons. It is not surprising that the works of Shakespeare rose out of this fecund field...