In 1962, philosopher Thomas Kuhn published his landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, forever changing our view of the history of science. Kuhn showed that scientific revolutions follow a certain pattern, in which periods of conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science.

In this article I’ll argue that the same thing applies to information revolutions – periods in which the volume of information that humans needed to manage grew dramatically in a short period. These information revolutions were similar to scientific revolutions, introducing whole new ways of thinking that were not possible before.

In order to survive and continue advancing through each of these periods, two things had to be invented:

• A new paradigm for our relationship to information
• A new kind of tool that manifested this new paradigm

These two inventions were self-reinforcing: the new paradigm allowed people to conceive of the new tool, and the new tool promoted the spread of the new paradigm.

I previously summarized the story of 60 of these inventions through 45,000 years of human history. These tools were not just slightly new and improved versions of something that existed before. Each one represented a whole new kindof tool that fundamentally expanded our ability to make use of information.

We are in the midst of an information explosion right now, perhaps the most challenging one that humanity has ever faced. 

The growth in information is no longer constrained by physical materials or space. And we aren’t just facing an information explosion at the level of society. Each and every one of us now has to individually handle information of unprecedented scale and complexity just to manage our daily lives.

To survive this explosion, we need to make it through yet another information revolution. By understanding the 7 stages that information revolutions typically follow, we’ll be able to see them when they inevitably arrive in our own era.

The 7 stages are:

• Externalization
• Abstraction
• Centralization
• Atomization
• Scaling
• Standardization
• Networking

Let’s examine each of them in greater detail.

Externalization

One of the first things that humans do in an information explosion is “externalize” what they know: they transfer information stored in their fragile biological brains to more durable forms

One of the earliest examples of externalization were the beads and pendants used in the Ice Age. They were made of stone, shells, or ivory, but were much more than trinkets. They allowed people to imbue physical objects with emotion, status, and significance. 

They externalized their knowledge of social relationships and tribal alliances into durable physical artifacts, which could be carried around, traded, and gifted. This allowed early humans to form much wider networks of social trust than was possible with only direct relationships. These networks took the form of tribes, clans, federations, nations, and religions.

Writing many thousands of years later in the 20th century, engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush described his “Memex,” a research tool for creating connections and associations between documents.

In the most famous passage from his landmark 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Bush explained the significance of creating these connections outside the researcher’s head: “The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.” It was only when this scaffolding was manifested outside the master’s head, that it became available for others to build upon.

Externalizing our ideas makes them into tangible building blocks that others can use and incorporate into their own work. Only then can our ideas extend beyond our circle of relationships and beyond our lifespan. 

Abstraction

As more and more information gets externalized, it starts to pile up. It soon becomes too time-consuming to read an entire document from beginning to end just to find a single piece of information.

This is where abstraction comes into play. Abstraction involves drawing out common characteristics from a collection of items, and organizing them according to these characteristics. This could include organizing written works by author or subject, or cataloguing a collection of photos by theme or era.

The earliest examples of abstraction closely followed the invention of writing. The earliest known document “abstract” was found in a Hittite settlement called Hattusas near modern day Ankara. The abstract contained keywords to help scribes preview the content of tablets in the collection, and call numbers to help them find the tablet they were looking for. The abstract helped readers quickly get the gist of a tablet, to decide whether it met their needs before diving in.

In a later era, the keeper of the Great Library at Alexandria was one of the first to systematically abstract the “meta-data” (or data about data)” for the massive collection of books. He assigned works to different rooms based on their subject matter, and then attached small tags to each scroll describing the work’s title, author, and subject. Browsers could visit the room most related to their topic of interest, and then read the tags for a summary of what was in each scroll without having to read through each one.