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Article Excerpt
At first blush, it may seem that the pairing of Shakespeare and Information Technology is an odd one. That, we will find, has more to do with common misperceptions about the second item in the pairing than with any ontological truth. An examination of these two epistemological categories requires that we settle our terms before attempting to tease out any propinquitous enrichment.
Following the vast majority of research, we may take Shakespeare as a known quantity. The same does not apply for the term information technology; which is deeply embedded in a network of marketing rhetoric that necessarily limits the scope of its definition. Thus, the term is both under--and overdetermined. In the case of the latter, it is clear that we have been promised a good deal more about recent advances in technology than they have been able to provide. In these cases, machines are marketed to a population dominated by an aging population as a means to mechanically enhance performance. As it always does when it works at its most optimal, the world of advertising first sells us the disease and then supplies the cure.
In scholarly terms, it is the underdetermination of Information Technology that is of interest. Putting aside our current conflation of recent advances in computing and telecommunications, let us turn to a far more robust system of meaning making: etymology. The OED lists information technology as "the branch of technology concerned with the dissemination, processing and storage of information, especially by computers." It seems clear that the final qualifier is as a result of the recent obsessions listed above. An examination of the chronology bears this out. At heart, information technology is about the dissemination, processing and storing information. What constitutes a computer has its own vexed history, however, since it is not part of the core definition we may leave it aside.
Information, according to the same source,...
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