Writing, as a means of storing information, has been an aspect of human life since the 4th millennium BC. Sumerians used impressionable clay tokens, clay tablets and styli to keep track of trading commodities. For thousands of years, the human race has refined its ways of communicating with each other and storing information.

In 1936, a man named Claude Shannon articulated a theory that was on the tip of many tongues at the time. He claimed that information was a physically quantifiable thing. He realized that by using Boolean algebra, the mathematics of dealing with 1’s and 0’s, unique values of 1’s and 0’s could be given to letters, words, or any information that had a definite ending. Since computers at the time were already advanced to the point of answering yes and no questions with binary digits, it became clear that any finite piece of information could be stored in a computer, thus giving it quantifiable space.

This digitization of information was the First Shock in the string of four to the way the world experienced connectivity and did business. Once information could be quantified in a way that computers could process, the industry of computing that was already progressing quite rapidly in the ’30s began to explode. The Second Shock, the  popularization of the personal computer, would not noticeably surface for decades, but from the point of Shannon positing his theory, it was on its way. Without the digitization of information, computing power could never have reached the expansive reign it enjoys today. And certainly without digitization pushing computing out of its original place of basic number calculating, the shock that mobile technology is about to bring on a global scale would not even be an idea in our minds.