5.1 Medieval Social Change and the Digital Renaissance

In many societies at different times, an event or series of events takes place that drastically alters the fundamental elements in the socio-economic balance between supply and demand. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death ravaged the population of Europe and Britain, and the sudden, drastic reduction of available labour changed the relationship between the gentry and the peasant class. Peasants who typically worked for a local lord realized their toil had intrinsic value. In many cases, peasants were lured from one village to another because of higher wages. Until this time, the lower rungs of the social hierarchy (that is, lower gentry, peasants, serfs, and so on) were given land by the local lord to produce crops to feed their family, a percentage of which was retained for the lord’s use. As time progressed, the lower gentry who swore allegiance to the king and the upper levels of the aristocracy converted the time they pledged for military service in campaigns such as the Crusades to payments in kind to the royal treasuries. This became the primary building block of the medieval currency and because of the Black Death peasants and serfs began receiving various forms of wages. This sudden reduction in population, which ranged between 20–50 per cent in some areas and as high as 100 per cent in isolated areas, coupled with the innovations of new technologies, was the starting point of an irreversible change which resulted in the Renaissance. When social change is combined with new technologies, the resulting process leads people to develop misconceptions about the true nature of technology’s effect on society, which Cooney noted is still true today:

The way in which new technology, including information technology, affects our lives is one of the very complex problems at the limits of our understanding. Major innovations in technology eventually change the whole social and natural environment within which we live. The speed and complexity of change lay a burden of analysis on human intelligence which it sometimes seems that intelligence is not able to cope with.^[136]

In effect, technology is blamed for many social problems to which it is only minimally connected and often the true nature of technology’s influence is realized after the passage of time. The Internet and other communications technologies have the same disruptive force in reshaping today’s society as the Black Death had during the Middle Ages. Cooney does not describe ‘informatics technology’ as a negative force, but as a mechanism for social evolution:

New informatics technology will play a significant role in making self sufficiency an attractive option. At present [1985], most people are dependent on jobs or on the state for the income with which to buy the means to live. By enabling the present large scale technology to be miniaturized, simplified, and adapted to the home or local community, informatics will enable people to become relatively independent of the larger economy, of commercial pressure and of bureaucracy, none of which any longer provide everyone with income yielding jobs. In particular, by enabling communities everywhere to communicate quickly and cheaply about common problems, the micro communication technology will reverse the present trend towards greater and greater dependence on the central bureaucracy and its ‘macro information technology’.^[137]

Therefore, if one considers the arguments raised in Chapter 1 on the intention of technology and its ultimate results, one will place technology in the greater context of changing the global socio-economic environment, thus concluding that the post-dot-com era of business is the beginning of a renaissance in the application of technology. Nevertheless, there has been a reduction of Internet traffic which cannot be solely attributed to the dot-com failures, as Liikanen points out:

The slowdown in the Internet revolution or more precisely the total number of people using the Internet for commerce is due to a variety of factors; the erosion of the technology’s novelty, concerns of security especially in Europe, the slow proliferation of transmission medium such as broadband and a focus that has concentrated on the technology not the people using it.^[138]

Conversely, digital communities are a new dimension of communications and intercultural exchange. It would be difficult and even imprudent to predict their total influence on humankind. However, they are now part of the greater human learning experience, and will usher in a new chapter in global business.

^[136]S. Cooney, ‘Maximizing the Benefits from New Technology’. In L. Yngstr m, R. Sizer, J. Berleur and R. Laufer (eds) Can Information Technology result in Benevolent Bureaucracies? (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1991) p. 127.

^[137]Ibid., p. 144.

^[138]E. Liikanen, The European Commission for Internet Policy.