Pierre Lévy - A comunicação mutante

We are living a great mutation of communication because of the development of informatics, computers, and above all because all of these computers are interconnected, they can communicate between themselves and because the computer web becomes a new mean of communication between people. And this computer web, which we can call the Internet or cyberspace, contains, today, the memory of human kind. That means that most of the content of libraries, museums, files, media, all messages produced by human beings, are inside this network, accessed, most of the time, free of charge and in world scale.

It is a completely new situation. It’s not the first time there were great mutations in human communication. It has happened in other moments of History.

For example, when we invented writing. When we invented writing, it was the first time language could exist externally, that there was a memory of language, exterior and permanent, which was not connected to the biological memory of a human being. And from the invention of writing, knowledge could accumulate and new forms of knowledge arose, more systematic knowledge, because, of course, before knowledge had a narrative form and, from the invention of writing, they still exist, but the organization of knowledge is different.