The last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid development in information and communication technologies (ICT), which has contributed to such drastic economic, social, and cultural changes that they are commonly referred to as the “Information Revolution”. This Information Revolution is believed by many to be so influential and comprehensive that it is bringing about an epochal rupture in global economic, social, cultural, and political history comparable to the previous major historical shifts of the Agrarian Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Naturally, a development so pervasive has been analysed by a great number of scholars from various disciplines, among whom social theorists, in all their diversity, have been the most numerous. Here is not the place for even a concise overview of the rich variety of theorizing and analysis of the Information Revolution and the resulting Information Society, but much of the theorization of the relationship between work and the most recent information revolution can still be traced to the initial statements about “postindustrial society”, “de-industrialization” and “globalization”.

This article examines some aspects of the labour involved in generating, recording and transmitting information in eighteenth-century Europe. It centres on the study of a particular occupational group: the men involved in the day-to-day operations of the schemes for the marketing of life-contingent pensions which would develop into modern life insurance, a form of enterprise whose growth was deeply implicated in the emerging “information society”. The bulk of the work these men did was what we would now call clerical work: keeping and processing records and accounts, managing correspondence, preparing reports for publication. It was in the nature of the information regimes within which they worked and the kind of information they were handling, though, that the responsibilities and demands placed on them went beyond those associated with the mechanical function of recording and reproducing. This made for an occupational profile which was relatively fluid, and only gradually came to be distinguishable from other contemporary forms of middle-class employment, in terms of the disciplines peculiar to it and the hazards it incurred. Among the hazards were forms of mental and physical strain that accompanied rapid increases in the volume of data that had to be handled and in the speed of its circulation, as a direct consequence of its character as “information”. While the account focuses on the study of a particular kind of enterprise in a particular place, northwest Germany, it draws on comparative data for officers and staff in analogous forms of commercial and administrative employment in Britain. The article concludes with a consideration of how their occupational profile might fit into an extended account of the historical development of information work.

The telegraph strike of 1908 occurred at many nodes of the telegraph system in British India and Burma, paralysing governance and business. In this paper, I suggest that the strike was a symptom of the systemic crisis in world telegraphy faced with technological change and competition. I introduce the category of transregional economic general strike as a tool to analyse strikes in the communication sectors. The strike demonstrated the ability of one of the earliest virtual communities in India to combine and organize worker protest. This multistage strike momentarily transcended the specific, and usually rigid, distinctions of race, class, and ethnicity through the production of community-at-a-distance. The strike occurred simultaneously among different sections of workers in Rangoon, Moulmein, Calcutta, Allahabad, Agra, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Karachi, to name just a few of the places involved. Both telegraph signallers as well as the subordinate staff went on strike. By concentrating on the relationship between technological change and labour, the paper demonstrates how workers across this part of the British Empire were capable of charting a general agenda in the first decade of the twentieth century, using technology to combine and combat technological rationalization.

Placing Thomas Edison at the beginning of a history on electric power transmission hardly needs justification. Thomas Edison's abundant supply of pictures of himself as an inventive genius – and America's pressing demand for a myth of an ingenious inventor – combined to bestow a “Eureka” moment upon Edison's pioneering Pearl Street (New York) Station electric lighting network. But the history of the laborious computations that took place at Menlo Park and the division-of-computing labor of which Edison took advantage suggests a different view of inventive genius. The story of the computational pyramid formed by the labors of Francis R. Upton, Charles L. Clarke, and Samuel D. Mott (1879–1880) can be reconstructed from the existing literature. In his reminiscences from Menlo Park, Edison's employee, Francis Jehl, detailed how Edison thought of constructing a miniaturized network to be used as a computer of the actual network. Knowing that constructing, maintaining, and using the miniature network required a considerable amount of skilled labor, Edison decided to hire an employee for it, Dr Herman Claudius. Edison enthusiastically welcomed Claudius to perform a type of computing work “requiring nerve and super abundance of patience and knowledge”. Jehl remembered that the labor of constructing a miniature network of conductors, “all in proportion, to show Mr Edison what he would have to install in New York City in connection with the Pearl Street Station” was “gigantic”. Following the pattern of the Pearl Street Station electric lighting network, several similar networks were built in the early 1880s. In response, Edison's labor pyramid was enlarged by giving Claudius an assistant, Hermann Lemp, who performed the monotonous task of constructing the new miniature networks, which Edison needed for computation. Inconvenient as it might be for those who assume that technological change is the product of inventive genius, electrification was, from the beginning, laboriously computed; it was not, like Athena, a deity that leapt from a godly head.

In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage that made Durban a thriving city and sustained the apartheid economy. Yet today the buffalo are all but gone, replaced by onboard warehouses known as containers. Machines have replaced the men once so integral to the survival of the city.

The twentieth century has been a period of rapid change in terms of production and consumption, work, and employment. Much of this change has been driven by developments in technology or the application of new technologies to existing production systems and ways of ordering and organizing work. In characterizing such change, Schumpeter popularized the term innovation. In viewing innovation as the main engine of economic growth, Schumpeter was interested in the idea of the entrepreneur as innovator, not simply in terms of an agent for the introduction of new inventions but more broadly as an organizational innovator introducing new systems of work, new products, and new forms of production.

In the decades following the development of the first electronic digital computers, the computer industry in the United States grew from nothing into an important and expansive sector of the American economy. Whereas in the early 1950s electronic computers were generally regarded as interesting but extravagant scientific curiosities, by 1963 these devices and their associated peripherals formed the basis of a billion-dollar industry. By the beginning of the 1970s, more than 165,000 computers had been installed in the United States alone, and the computer and software industries employed several hundred thousand individuals worldwide.

One of the aspects of the information revolution that has had negative implications for many workers is the erosion of the workplace as a basis for long-term security and collective solidarity. The dramatic pace of technological change, complex restructuring of firms, and continual competitive pressures for rapid innovation that are a central component of the information economy are contributing to fundamental transformations in work and employment. As part of this transformation, the trend towards the centralization of production in large enterprises that was the dominant feature of the industrial era is being superseded by production organized around smaller workplaces connected together in complex, constantly shifting networks operating at multiple spatial scales, from the local to the global. For many workers, one result is greater insecurity, as they increasingly have to update their skills, change jobs and even change careers more frequently. Some analysts have gone so far as to characterize the typical information age worker as a “free-floating individual, connected on-line to a variety of task-performing organizations, ever-competing for resources and personal support, and assuming limited responsibilities towards limited people for a limited time”.

In 1995 AOL announced that it would be converting its pricing plan from an hourly rate that ranged from $3 to $6 an hour to a flat monthly rate of $15.95. The increase in member subscription was expected to be significant, and a wave of concern swept through the large remote-staff volunteer population, whose duties included monitoring electronic bulletin boards, hosting chat-rooms, enforcing the Terms of Service agreement (TOS), guiding AOL users through the online community, and even creating content using the AOL's own program, RAINMAN (Remote Automated Information Manager), the text scripting language and the publishing tool that allows remote staffers to update and change content on AOL. Chief among remote-staff volunteer's concerns was the initiative to convert many of the volunteer accounts from overhead accounts, which had access to tools and privileges that made remote-staff volunteers' duties on par with in-house employees, to unbilled or discounted accounts. In a meeting meant to address the emerging concerns of remote-staff volunteers held over electronic chat, Bob Marean, a representative for AOL, confronted over 450 remote-staff volunteers.

As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyday of desktop-office information technology (IT). In the spirit of full disclosure, before I leap into an analysis of how we might more broadly conceptualize information technology together with information labor in different historical contexts, I have decided to work through my own historical narrative a bit. After all, if historical practice teaches us nothing else, it teaches that each of us makes sense of the world through the lens of personal experience, leaving historians (among others) with the daunting task of interpreting, translating, and finding patterns of meaning in those experiences. Thus I offer this candid admission: “I was a teenage information worker!”