Gutenberg and the Samurai: Or, The Information Revolution is History

Abstract

This paper explores the relation between history and information revolutions, in particular the most recent such revolution, that of digitization. I argue that information revolutions are shaped by protagonists' efforts to reshape history itself, on a range of scales from the very small and contemporary to the very large and long-term. Making a digital revolution involved reconceptualizing the deeper history of print and other media, and also rethinking the local cultural processes that allowed for digital media to take effect. Reconstructing history in such ways is hard work and is always liable to foment confrontations, which often take the form of contests over prized entities like property. These contests, the paper argues, provide points of access, thanks to which we can grasp what otherwise tend to be elusive and complex cultural processes. To make my case, the paper concentrates on an attempt in the 1980s-2000s to digitize Japanese. A company named NIC (later Foursis) tried to produce a digital system that would incorporate the entire kanji character set, intending to integrate this within a broader vision to democratize the design and production of the page itself. The effort led to a catastrophic piracy case, which prompted the articulation of the historiographical claims, perspectives, and stakes in the bid to transform print practices into digital.

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