On any given day, a reader of this textbook is likely to receive an e-mail message from someone claiming to be the widow of a deposed dictator offering to share her ill-gotten riches in return for the reader’s cooperation or banking information. Millions of such messages are transmitted daily around the world. Their proliferation rides upon a swift and profound change in information and communications technologies.

The invention of moving pictures, the telephone, and other communications technologies between 1875 and 1900 prepared the way for a twentieth-century era of mass communications. In parallel, new information-processing technologies began with development of adding and calculating machines and culminated in the development of the first computers during the Second World War. As computing and communications technologies converged, they created the “information age.” The global availability and affordability of radios and television sets in the 1950s introduced a second communications revolution that followed the first revolution brought by telegraph and telephone. The transistor radio penetrated the most isolated hamlets of the world. Governments embraced radio broadcasting as a means to project their power, disseminate propaganda, and broaden education. Though initially less common, television use expanded into nearly every country during the 1960s and 1970s, even if there was only one television in a village.

Governments recognized the power of the visual image to promote their ideologies or leaders, and a state television network became a source of national pride. In countries like Brazil, television transmission towers that rose up in the 1960s became monuments to modernity and development. Around the world, governments controlled the introduction of color television to symbolize progress. The Argentine military junta introduced color broadcasting to the nation for the 1978 soccer World Cup, transmitting games that took place within earshot of the detention centers where it waged its “dirty war.” Television became a powerful disseminator of culture: U.S. television programming reached around the world. Mexican television programs dominated Spanish-speaking regions. Brazilian soap operas gained loyal followers from the Soviet Union to Angola.

The third, and perhaps greatest, communications revolution occurred with the first Apple personal computers in 1976, followed by the introduction of cell phones in 1985. The use of mass communications and the pace of technological development in communications have exploded since then. Cell phones allowed individuals and nations in the developing world to bypass traditional telephone lines, installation, and other obstacles. Africa now has over 85 million cell phone users. Cell phones have become among the most widely owned communications tools worldwide.

Despite the ubiquity of cell phones, the Internet, or World Wide Web, has had the greatest impact on human communication. First made available to the general public in 1994, the Internet and e-mail allow people to communicate instantly anywhere with an Internet connection. The possibilities for global access to information and knowledge are seemingly infinite. Authoritarian governments have realized the threat that the Internet and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter pose to their power and control. The governments of China and North Korea, for example, have spent millions of dollars trying to restrict information traveling in and out of their countries over the Internet, while the governments of the United States and other nations have spent even more to develop ways to monitor that information. Even as expanding means of communication through cell phones, computers, and their networks have made censorship more difficult to enforce, they have made it even harder to keep information or communications private.

The intensity of innovation in communications and information technology created new business giants. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and IBM are entities that stand at the forefront of the contemporary world, and they absorb and distribute enormous amounts of capital. Their combined revenue in 2012 was $335.5 billion, larger than the GDP of Nigeria. Apple’s revenue alone was larger than the GDP of Hungary or any of 125 other countries.9

The success of these technology companies and the proliferation of computer, cellular telephone, and Internet use are remarkable changes, but they also deepen a stubborn continuity: deep socioeconomic inequalities between countries and within countries. For instance, when Windows XP was released in 2001, a Nigerian cocoa laborer would have had to save his or her entire year’s earnings to buy the Home Edition.10 The unevenness of both the production and consumption of computer technology has resulted in a digital divide, meaning the gap in access to Internet, computer, and telecommunications resources. This gap is the greatest between nations like the United States, western European countries, and Japan and nations in Africa and South or Southeast Asia. The digital divide also exists between the wealthy and poor, as well as between urban and rural areas within countries. As the Internet becomes more integral to business, education, and government, communities with no or limited access face growing disadvantages.