The debate often becomes mired in arguing the question of the relation of the Information Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. The utopian stance toward the impact of information technology obviously has its roots in the idea of "progress," the narrative of redemption through mechanical invention and innovation that first emerged to smooth the adoption of new forms of industrial organization in the late-eighteenth century. The dystopian view, the position that Kaplan characterizes as that of the social determinists can also be traced to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; many of the present-day adherents of such a view have self-consciously embraced the neo-Luddite label, placing themselves on the side of those who argue that technological change is motivated not by a drive toward liberation but a lust for new forms of control.
The connection with the Industrial Revolution is adopted even by those who sanguinely claim that the more things change the more they stay the same. Herbert A. Simon, for example, argues that computers are unlikely to bring about significant social change: as the Industrial Revolution saw the supplementing of human muscle with machine muscle, so the most recent phase of the ongoing revolution is merely the supplementing of the human brain with machine intelligence (Simon 5).
Situated against the progressive, neo-Luddite and business-as-usual attitudes, are those critics who argue that for better or worse the Information Revolution represents a decisive break with its industrial predecessor, in the same way as the Industrial Revolution broke with previous forms of economic and social organization. This perspective ultimately owes a great deal to the work of Marshall McLuhan, but a more specific contemporary application can be seen in the work of George Landow, and even Kaplan herself, both of whom argue that infotech represents a decisive break with older forms of reading, and hence the cultural notions of literacy to which they give rise.
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