Lest we forget.....................................

      Otlet not only invites study as an early avatar of the networked age.  His life and work also shed light on the deeper causes and conditions of the information age in which we now live.  While the proliferation of computers in recent years has certainly contributed to the much-chronicled problem of information overload, the first rumblings of our present-day data deluge really started during the second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the citizens of Europe and North America experienced a series of unprecedented technological transformations.  In the span of just a few decades, and enormous number of innovations were unleashed:  automobiles, airplanes, radio, telegraphs, typewriters, punch cards, microfilm, vaccines, and mechanical weapons.  Taken together, these rapid advances created a state of technological culture shock.  People and nations that had once lived in relative isolation quickly found themselves intertwined in a mesh of complex networks.  Telegraphs, telephones, railways, post offices, and expanding road systems allowed people, goods, and money to move across national borders more easily than ever before.  As a result, ideas started moving more freely as well, triggering an explosion of published information.  The resulting intellectual, commercial, and political entanglements gave rise to whole new industries, professions, and modes of thought, as well as to new opportunities for conflict - reaching the horrific crescendo of World War I.  This gave rise to a new "internationalist" consciousness that inspired some to imagine fundamentally new modes of living in a global, networked society.
-Alex Wright,  as excerpted from Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age