The End of the Contemporary and the Birth of Connectivage

This article proposes a historical periodization grounded in the long-term transformation of the material conditions of communication, information circulation, and access to knowledge. It introduces the neologisms Conectivera in Portuguese and Connectivage in English to designate a historical period beginning with the consolidation of electrical telegraphy in the mid-nineteenth century and developing through four phases: the emergence of electrical communication; communication and total war; technological competition and the globalization of communication; and the digitalization and democratization of knowledge. The proposal recognizes major precedents in scholarship on longue durée, periodization, regimes of historicity, media, network society, and connective knowledge, while combining them into a distinct historiographical category. It further argues that the COVID-19 pandemic and the public diffusion of generative artificial intelligence between 2020 and 2022 constituted a compound historical caesura. The pandemic accelerated the social incorporation of digital infrastructure, while the diffusion of generative AI added a new cognitive function to that infrastructure: the possibility for artificial systems to participate in selected processes of generating, synthesizing, and transforming information. The article therefore proposes the end of the Connective Age and the beginning of the New Contemporary, understood as a provisional designation of the historical present after the caesura. Finally, it proposes a historiographical agenda capable of incorporating algorithmic source criticism, digital provenance, large-corpus analysis, and methodologically controlled uses of artificial intelligence.