Introduction: History’s Relevance to Digital Disruption

Disruption Isn’t New

The digital realm may be fairly recent, but disruption isn’t anything new. Like so many phenomena from past eras – the printing press, modern agriculture, quantum physics – something new comes along and changes everything, rewriting civilization afresh. The digital is only a fresh chapter in this pattern.

But our hyper-mediated present seems to move past the past, as though a prior century were comparable to last year’s mobile phone model – quickly discarded as we ever focus on the absorbing spectacle of the present. Our digital civilization seems blind to its foundations – perhaps because the ceaseless parade of what is new allows little leisure for reflection.

This ebook is written based on the assumption that the only way to understand our digital existence is through the lens of history. Each chapter addresses a current topic, but in terms of history. Sometimes we are repeating history; sometimes we are evolving it. But we are never escaping it.

Disrupting How Knowledge is Shared and Evolved

Books enable reflection, in part because they take time to write, to publish, and to read. This is part of print’s great legacy: it slows us down, gives us some distance to evaluate, to be objective. No wonder books have such a revered place in our culture. They can give order and clarity, and they can be agents of change.

But books can be ponderous, sluggish and slow. And even a brief volume can take many months or years between its conception and its ultimate distribution. Even electronically-aided publication is lethargic, subject as it is to traditional methods of gathering, vetting, and preparing content for proper dissemination.

This very slowness can be a virtue, of course, allowing for ideas to form, to be refined and peer-reviewed, to come together as a nicely finished and coherent artifact. But it can be a vice as well. Our day moves faster than print and print-based ways of knowing.

This is why LeanPub has been our choice for creating a short book, briefly put together, and by amateurs. LeanPub is committed to the idea of “publish early and often,” echoing Eric Raymond’s software development philosophy of “release early and often”: in an environment where it is possible to quickly circulate and get feedback on one’s ideas, it is better to circulate them quickly and in a “good enough” form, rather than to delay for the sake of better quality.

Quality matters, of course, but arriving at quality may require tolerance for less-than-best at first so that one can leverage the exposure of one’s ideas and take advantage of informal feedback from a range of people (rather than formal reviews from a select few).

These are student essays in the original sense of that word, from the French essayer – meaning to try (that is, both to attempt and to test). We are testing our ability to connect the digital now with the historical then. We won’t get it all right. But we are escaping the print world view mentality that insists nothing is worth circulating unless it has been perfected. No, we perfect as we go, happily connected to so many people who can build upon whatever we offer in good faith.

To paraphrase Newton’s famous phrase, progress occurs by standing on the shoulders of giants – and perhaps on the shoulders of lesser creatures who don’t put themselves in Newton’s class. We authors do not have pretensions to grandeur, but we have learned a thing or two in studying history and connecting it to today. So here it is, and we hope it will be something upon which others may build.

Dr. Gideon Burton

About the Editor

Dr. Gideon O. Burton, Brigham Young University