If you do not think that the way that information is stored and distributed is all that important, all one needs to do is briefly reflect on the history of religion and society at large. The earliest form of writing was carved in stone, or impressed upon clay cuneiform tablets. It is no coincidence that the Bible says that Moses came down from Mt. Arrarat with the 10 commandments written in stone...which consequently get broken.

If we think of written language as a technology (and it surely is), we could read this story as a description of the problem with this particular technology - the stone breaking is one of the probems with the system of information distribution that stone and cuneiform tablets represent. But if that's all you think about, then you miss the bigger innovation, which is that which was written on the stone: laws.

Is it possible for laws to exists, as we know them, without having the ability to write them down? Writing them down is important because it provides a separate, objective and authoritative reference to the law. Without permanent writing, there is no law. Yes - even today we acknowledge this by saying that some rules are "written in stone"...they are authoritative and permanent. They apply to everyone. They are laws.

Because of the technical limitations of stone tablets as a means of writing things down, the innovation of the papyrus scroll soon arose, and stuck with us for a long time. Now, consider this: the story of Moses and the ten commandments was told for hundreds - if not thousands - of years before it was written down. The story was not written down until the technological innovation of the papyrus scroll. It simply wasn't practical to write down all that much when you were limited to stone tablets. Because of the scroll, all of the stories of religious significance to the people of that time were written down...so now instead of retelling the story, you can write it down and one consequence of writing it down is much greater fidelity in transmission - the story is exactly the same across generations. But, again, this is more than a story about technology, because in the same way that the stone tablet enabled the existence of the law, the scroll enabled the existence of scripture. Without the scroll, I'd be willing to bet that monotheism would have never developed. Documents - whether on stone or papyrus - solidified the authoritative nature of these stories.

Law and scripture are the two loci of power in almost all of human history.

And if that isn't enough to illustrate this point, I also point out that the innovation of the codex occurred at the same time as the rise of Christianity. In fact, the earliest examples of ancient codices that have been discovered are almost invariably Christian documents. The scripture that was captured in these codices is different, too, because many of them started their life as humble letters written from one person to another - letters which could not have existed without the technological improvements in Roman roads.

The Christian Church grew, (and solidifed it's power by asserting a collection of these letters as canonical) in part because of the authority established in the codices of the early days of the church.

The next major change in the history of the Church is about writing, too. In the middle ages, the printing press (moveable type) was invented in Gutenberg. Guess what happened next? The Reformation. Martin Luther was an innovative early-adopter of technology and his use of it changed the church, and even of our idea of scripture itself. It was Martin Luther, after all, who began to print the bible in the local vernacular using moveable type. Many people attribute his innovation to publishing the bible in the local vernacular, but that isn't it. Bibles had already been printed in the vernacular prior to Martin Luther. The thing that was different was that Martin Luther used moveable type and could therefore make corrections to the text. By placing the book itself in the hands of the common person and insuring that the text was accurately presented, the authority of the Church as the interpreter of that book diminished and was transferred to the book itself and even to this day, protestant Christians speak of the inerrancy of scripture as an analog to papal infallibility. The scripture is considered inerrant by some, in no small measure, because errors can be fixed.

It is an interesting cycle - at first, written language was used to establish authority, but as it became more widespread, it began to be used as a way to subvert it and limit it...consider the very reason we believe in the free press. Consider the work of Tom Paine and other's like him. Could democracy exist without the printing press?

Now, we have another innovation upon us. Yes, it's true that it is a technical innovation in our means of distribution, but it is much more. It is going to enable new ideas and concepts to flourish, it's going to change the power structure of government and the economy of states.

In the sense that clay tablets were the technical innovation that opened the door to writing itself and then to the very idea of "law", the Internet and the world wide web are the technical innovations leading to something else, whose identity is unformed. The germ of the idea has been planted and it is what we call the "semantic web"....a web of meaning encoded in such a way that it is readable to both humans and machine. It's going to change the very nature of what can be written down and how we think. It is an entirely new form of discourse.

E-commerce isn't going to change the world. The Semantic Web is.