| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 301. $29.95.

Fifty years ago, most Americans would have recognized the acronym "CIO" as standing for "Congress of Industrial Organizations." Today, many would say that it refers to "Chief Information Officer." That we live in an era in which the job title "information officer" has become pervasive reflects the seeming centrality of "information" to our times. Pundits repeatedly remind us that this is the "information age." 1

Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman's wide-ranging, scholarly, and complex study challenges that popular formulation. Instead, they contend that this is actually the third information age. The first came with the rise of literacy. Only with written language could information itself emerge, they argue, since "information consists of mental objects separated from the flux of experience," and "only writing extracts the sounds of speech from their oral flow by giving them visual representation" (p. 4). Writing, as it emerged in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, thus constituted "the first information technology and birth of information itself" (p. 34). The development of the Greek alphabet (as opposed to pictorial symbols) took literacy a crucial step further and made possible more abstract systems of classification and natural philosophy. . . .

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