[PEN-L:8208] Re: Re: Re: Re:Information revolution?

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Dorman wrote:

>The information technology revolution is best compared to electricity, I
>think.  Just as electricity permitted a truly distributed power supply,
>so the computer does this to information.  It's hard to imagine the
>radical reorganization of work and space in the twentieth century
>without electricity.  I think that we will see similar effects from the
>computer.  Very imperfectly, this is what the "postfordism" literature
>has been trying to get at, at least in part.
>
>Of course, the larger context is equally important -- I'm not arguing
>for any sort of technological determinism.  But different technologies
>also have qualitatively different effects on society.

No one is arguing that computers aren't really really important. The New
Economy types are arguing, explicitly or not, that they're unprecedentedly
important. And that case just isn't proved, to put it mildly.

Doug