Long economic waves, also called Kondratiev waves, are related to inventions and technologies, which change not only production processes but also the way of living. After the steam, steel, electricity, and petrochemical revolutions, network-based digitalization is the driving force today on the stage of business and private life. The Internet as a mass phenomenon, which began in the 1990s, allows easy and cheap connection of information technology systems. The next steps of technological progress as well as innovations in business and social life rely on information technology. As Nefiodow puts it: The 6. Kondratiev wave, which could be health and bioengineering, will be based on today’s 5. Kondratiev wave, which is information technology. A technological prerequisite of these developments is digitalization, which means the expression of information in strings of 0 and 1, called binary or digital strings. They are omnipresent in today’s life: music, videos, also the control systems in cars, on-board computers in airplanes, encoded human DNA, and, importantly, emails and web pages are encoded in 0 and 1. Digital strings are not visible, but affect all economic segments. That is in common with electricity, another technological revolution. Furthermore, both can be stored: electricity in a battery; a digital string, e.g. an email, on a medium such as a CD. But only the network between producer and user allows the instant exchange and use of digital goods and electricity respectively. This shows that the phenomenon of digitalization has to be attributed to the interplay of several products – just as power plants and energy networks have to be considered together to explain the international trade of electricity.
Homo Habilis and Stone Crafting: Early Sense of Technology in Human Community
