Track: Paper session

Presenters

László Z. Karvalics Conceptual framework for Information History macropatterns
Howard Bloom The Biological Tricks That Knit A Global Brain
Miklós Sükösd Towards a comparative information history of empires: longue durée patterns of monism vs. pluralism
Gabor Szommer Cultures as information aggregators: an example from South-East Asia (The formation of shared navigational knowledge, 1500-1650
Moon Ho Lee 780 years History of Jong Nang Binary Code
Endre Kiss Globalization and Knowledge: The New Relationship in the Context of the Globalization

Moderator

László Z. Karvalics, University of Szeged, Hungary

Objectives

Talking about „Information Revolutions” in World History, there is no answer from the technological deterministic approach to a simple question: a structural change in the tools and effectivity of information management is a cause or a consequence of great socioeconomic transformations?

We propose to analyze the all-time information culture in the context of all-time environmental challenges to build solid foundation to comparative history research. We highlight information anthropology basics: the cyclic nature of information, isolating its representation, processing and action output stages, applying the information stock-flow model.

Using this conceptual framework, we can approach the World History using bigger and bigger time-series, coupling with different theories of Big History. The information anthropology point of view seems to be valid and operative dealing with the whole, two hundred thousand years history of homo sapiens and the more than two million years prehistory of hominids.

And what is more, we can talk about the zoo-history of information, since the birth of information behavior has been emerging only in the given point of the development of living systems. Identifying and understanding this “origin of neuropsychological information” provides us clear conceptual framework to restart, re-read and re-frame the long history of information, concerning to its primordial nature.

Co-organiser

Szeged Information History Workshop