E
chapter 7
Paths to Digital Modernity
Computerization as Social Change
Jürgen Danyel and Annette Schuhmann
B
y the time microelectronics fi rst appeared on the scene in the early
1970s, computers and all related information and communications
technologies were well on their way to becoming a decisive factor in the
development of modern industrial societies. Over the course of the 1980s,
the computer, and new media formats associated with it, spread irrevo-
cably into the deepest corners of society. The digital revolution touched
virtually all aspects of life—from work, social communications, political
culture, education, consumption, and leisure time all the way to personal
lifestyle choices. Yet scholars of contemporary history in Germany have
paid very little attention thus far to the phases and turning points within
this process, nor have they analyzed the role of computerization within
the context of the economic, social, and political upheavals in the last
thirty years of the twentieth century.
Although the Internet revolution was very much a phenomenon of the
1990s, when state socialism had already collapsed (not counting the early
beginnings of the web), the history of computerization was very much
embedded in the political and social constellations of the Cold War. Since
the late 1960s, technological innovation in microelectronics, computers,
and software development had been one of the major fi elds of competi-
tion between Western industrialized societies and the Eastern Bloc coun-
tries. In addition to its very technological aspects, this rivalry also had
sociopolitical and cultural dimensions. Whereas technological progress
in electronic data processing in the 1950s and 1960s occurred primarily
within the isolated arcane confi nes of military and scientifi c research,
or at best in the major computing centers in large companies and gov-
