This journal, Visual Anthropology, has now been in existence for a third of a century, and so it is an appropriate moment to look back at where we and our scholarship have come from, and what changes we have seen during our own lifetimes. This article first gives a rapid overview of the four major forms of information technology in human history. These were the age of oral transfer of messages, writing, printing, and lastly the age of mechanical reproduction, including the development of digital technologies. The rest of the article recalls the author’s own experience of the most recent period of computer and multi-media work. The first phase of this was the computer revolution from the 1960s to around the Millennium, the second is the spread of the high-speed internet with the accompanying tools on the web. The article ends by considering some of the implications for anthropology of the accumulated developments, in terms of on-line databases, digital repositories and personal publishing. Anthropology has been transformed during the author’s lifetime by the rapid growth of more powerful tools of communication, and it is likely that this will increase exponentially into the future. As anthropologists we need to see the big picture of how this has happened and what its implications are.

中文翻译：

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人类学与第三次信息革命

这本名为 Visual Anthropology 的期刊现在已经存在了三分之一个世纪，因此现在是回顾我们和我们的学术从何而来，以及我们在自己的一生中所看到的变化的合适时机。本文首先快速概述了人类历史上信息技术的四种主要形式。这是口头信息传递、书写、印刷的时代，最后是机械复制的时代，包括数字技术的发展。文章的其余部分回顾了作者自己在最近一段时间的计算机和多媒体工作中的经历。第一个阶段是从 1960 年代到千禧年左右的计算机革命，第二个阶段是高速互联网的普及以及网络上的相关工具。文章最后考虑了在线数据库、数字存储库和个人出版方面的累积发展对人类学的一些影响。在作者的有生之年，人类学已经被更强大的交流工具的快速增长所改变，而且这种情况很可能在未来呈指数增长。作为人类学家，我们需要全面了解这是如何发生的及其影响。