“It was in 1964, when Paul Baran introduced his work on “distributed
communications”. That’s were it started to become reality.
http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/RM3420/RM3420.chapter1.html
BTW, the graphic there is quite good also to understand the shift within
societies from centralized to de-centralized to (more or less)
participatory ones. So, technology is influencing the shaping of society
and also the other way round.
Best,
Laurent” [to the AoIR listserv}