James W. Cortada has broken new ground in his most recent book dealing with the history of information in the United States since 1870. Cortada advances a new and intriguing scholarly perspective that emphasizes the analysis of the critical role of information in the form of facts and data in shaping social dynamics. The importance of this topic is partially evinced by the tremendous contemporary economic impact of information technology. The market capitalization, for example, of the seven largest information-based companies in the U.S. financial markets—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft—amounted to more than $2.5 trillion in March 2017. Each of these enterprises alone, with the exceptions of Big Blue (IBM) and Cisco, had greater market value than either of the two largest U.S. industrial enterprises: Johnson & Johnson, at $341 billion, and Exxon-Mobil, at $339 billion. Although Cortada's work evaluates the interplay of information within the context of such business leviathans, his study extends far beyond that sphere. He develops a framework of analysis for evaluating the impact of information applicable to all the facets of the U.S. social scene.
Although he acknowledges the influence of information economist Fritz Machlup, Cortada's research, I believe, represents an extension of a line of inquiry developed by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. late in his career. Chandler recognized the importance of information in advancing the understanding of the management of giant enterprises. As early as the mid-1960s, when he left Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach and edit the papers of President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Johns Hopkins University, Chandler thought business history could ultimately form useful linkages to information science and cybernetics. However, he was first able to begin to address this lacuna only in the volume he jointly edited with James Cortada in 2000, A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to Present. Subsequently, in his last two major works—Inventing the Electronic Century (2001) and Shaping the Industrial Century (2005)—Chandler focused again on the connections between management, information, and knowledge through the elaboration of a firm-specific concept that he termed the “integrated learning base.” This school of thought dedicated to understanding the nature of the connections between information, institutions, and organizations has benefitted greatly from, in addition to James Cortada's work, the brilliant contributions of such gifted scholars as James R. Beniger, Margaret B. W. Graham, Richard R. John, and JoAnne Yates, among others.
In his current study, Cortada stresses the fundamental role of information as a critical foundation supporting all forms of cognition and as a driver of social dynamics. His paradigm is not limited to business historical inquiry. The ordering of information in its varied forms is pervasive and includes such diverse activities as driving an automobile, cooking a meal, engaging in a hobby like stamp collecting, asserting legal rights in courts, and designing an effective information system to control an enterprise of great scale, scope, and complexity.
Cortada's scholarly perspective seems analogous to that of Arthur O. Lovejoy in his exposition of the ways to approach the study of the history of ideas in his The Great Chain of Being first presented in the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1933. Lovejoy perceived ideas as the central element in advancing culture change. Like individual chemical elements, “unit ideas,” to use his term, were capable of being combined to synthesize new belief systems that shaped human understanding. In contrast, Cortada's analysis substitutes information for ideas. Implicit in this latter choice is the recognition that information is both a broader cognitive denominator and the substrate for the coalescence of ideas. The structuring of information affects perception, ideation, and ultimately action. Information in Cortada's model is, however, conditioned by environmental factors that either facilitate or restrain its dissemination and influence.
Cortada identifies eight often-overlapping facilitators that advanced the utilization of facts and data in ways that created virtuous cycles of societal endeavor. In each case he provides an extensive discussion and analysis of historical examples. First, organizations such as schools, universities, and professional societies, served as conduits for transmitting highly refined information in the form of formal learning. Second, a growing demographic base, even with substantial cultural diversity, created increasing demands for information. Third, government encouraged information dissemination when it acted to encourage the development of a well-informed citizenry who were thus made more capable of sustaining the preservation of cherished democratic traditions. The state also played a central role in information transmission through its control of the posts and the electronic spectra that support telecommunications; also, it extended information through the support of education and research in such varied fields as agriculture, defense, energy, and health. Fourth, through the capitalistic exploitation of the potentials of electricity and the petroleum-based internal combustion engine, economics and technology radically broadened the demand for information relating to these new, revolutionary capacities. Fifth, education transformed information into useful learning that was channeled through pedagogical organizations such as public schools, land grant colleges, and vocational and professional training programs. Sixth, urbanization enhanced the exploitation of particular information bases through efficiencies from contiguous communication between specialists located in relatively narrow geographic areas. Seventh, information technology annihilated the constraints of cost, distance, time, and complexity in the conversion of facts and data to useful knowledge through such devices as adding machines, telephones and telegraphs, and electronic computers. Eighth, codification strengthened information reliability through processes of classification, certification, and standardization that became manifest in such forms as curricula, report formats, information tables, and library and telephone decimal systems.
Although the facilitators have outgunned the restrainers in the U.S. experience, six additional factors presented impediments to information-driven socialization. The first, linguistic diversity, could restrict the dispersion of information to particular national or ethnic groups within polyglot communities. Second, education could, ironically, curtail information spread through the inaccessibility to learning opportunities because of cost or the failure of training units to inculcate sufficiently high levels of literacy or numeracy. Third, social attitudes discouraged the education of women and minorities, and limited the instructional opportunity for young people by allowing exploitation of child labor. Fourth, economics in those cases when it denied access to education, books, and electronic media because of limited financial resources. Fifth, industry practices that unreasonably frustrated career advancement by raising the educational entry bar too high through the imposition of rigid professional or bureaucratic rules. Sixth, technology impeded access to information because of incompetency in handling digital resources.
Cortada has advanced scholarship by improving our understanding of the significance of the informational forces that have been transforming U.S. society at an accelerating pace since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The transformation began during the Second Industrial Revolution with the rising need for information about new sources of power. It came to fuller maturity during the Third Industrial Revolution as innovative digital capacities vastly increased the availability and value of information. Although his study is period specific, the tractability of Cortada's notions about information makes possible their general applicability in evaluating other eras and milieus. Moreover, the concepts and examples presented in his provocative volume provide a framework for analysis that should be especially germane to scholars who wish to examine the dynamic connections between the information phenomenon and its socio-cultural context. Ultimately, Cortada's new historiography not only creates a means for assessing how informational factors tie the past to the present, but also adumbrates the probable direction of future change.
