378 JÜRGEN DANYEL AND ANNETTE SCHUHMANN
munications infrastructure was one of the most important and most ex-
pensive elements of the reconstruction of East Germany.
All in all, the rise of the Internet further propelled the trend toward
digital modernity. Economically, this gave a boost to the computer and
software industries before the fi rst signs of a crisis in this classic sector
of the digital economy appeared. The changes that the Internet brought
in terms of the world of work and social communications, as well as the
availability and acquisition of knowledge, could only be dealt with cur-
sorily here. The same can also be said for the new round of confl icts
between commercial and democratic interests that have come about
through the use of this medium. The social developments that accompa-
nied the advent of the Internet, moreover, were not really tied up in the
rivalry between the systems, nor the division of Germany. Consequently,
the year 1989 was not as momentous for the path to digital modernity as
it was in other areas because it merely marked the end of the attempts
in the Communist bloc to steer computerization in keeping with a state-
controlled planned economy and a closed society. After all, the GDR and
the other states of the Eastern Bloc were nothing more than a small epi-
sode in the history of the Internet.
Conclusion
The path of Western industrialized societies and the Eastern Bloc states
into digital modernity mostly followed a parallel history until the collapse
of Communism. In the East as well as the West, computerization and
the social changes associated with it became the focus of visions of the
future as well as actual economic policy strategies. Well into the 1970s,
the GDR and the other countries in the Communist bloc off ensively tried
to diff erentiate themselves by stressing their political, social, and cultural
alternatives to the prevailing orders in the West. In doing so, they also
tried to gloss over, or rather reinterpret, how they were lagging behind in
many respects. But this mechanism no longer worked for computeriza-
tion after the failed attempts to reform the centralized economy and the
violent suppression of the Prague Spring. Whereas the political rhetoric
of expectations surrounding technological advancement did not waiver,
the ability of these countries to keep up with the digital revolution be-
came a question of economic and, ultimately, political survival. Although
many of the ideological structures that propped up the faith in state so-
cialism had begun to erode in the 1970s, including those that were tied
to technological advancement, the SED still clung to its commitment to
modernity without interruption. The norms for better work and a better