Forgetting the ancestors of digital technologies: For a rehabilitation of the long-term view of technological trajectories

Abstract

The digital revolution we are supposedly living through was already announced thirty years ago. After defining the terms “digital,” “revolution,” and “transition,” and after presenting a short chronology of some digital technologies, this article questions the reality of the phenomenon. Two case studies, conducted over several decades, demonstrate that these developments have rather cyclical movements. To better understand the digital phenomenon, this paper proposes to rehabilitate the long-term view, inviting the reader to revisit academic works on the genetics of industrial objects, and their developmental and genealogical trajectories. Extending these analyses to digital technologies helps to clarify the strategies of innovation by putting them into perspective.