A-ha's for week 4
As We May Think was particularly interesting to me because of the time in which it was written. It is clear that Dr. Bush was well-informed about a great deal of scientific history, research and innovation. I think he was right on the money when he spoke of working on "the record." I think he would've been quite pleased with the way things have developed in our "information society." The foresight with which he predicted the need-for and development of a way to organize research and information in a way that was accessible and user-friendly says a lot about his ability to think on a global level.
Now that we have the Internet and the World Wide Web at our fingertips, it is no surprise that new discoveries and research have taken on new life and speed. Information is power, and we have more organized and accessible information now more than ever.
Chapter four of Mediamorphosis: Understanding new Media, did an excellent job of outlining the history and background of technology. I don't feel like I took much new information away from this reading, but it did reinforch some very important points. The way it outlined both the social and technical history of of technological advances gave a good overall view of how technology advances. Instead of isolating each technology, you really get a sense of how one plays off another. I was also reminded that technological advances are not solely based on technology, but on the needs of the time and who had access to the technology. Just as Alexander Grand Bell did not expect the phone to be used the way in which it is today, there was a need and a demand that it filled.
I found myself thinking of technology as a tree, where each ring was a new technology. I use this metaphor because without the previous rings, the new ring could not grow. The chapter mentioned the railroad, maybe not something I would have thought to be connected to technological development, but other ideas and innovations in communications technology were brought to life in-part because of it. I don't think there is any one comunications technology that can stand alone without those previous "rings" to support it. There is a technological core, that new innovations and development build upon.
As We May Think was particularly interesting to me because of the time in which it was written. It is clear that Dr. Bush was well-informed about a great deal of scientific history, research and innovation. I think he was right on the money when he spoke of working on "the record." I think he would've been quite pleased with the way things have developed in our "information society." The foresight with which he predicted the need-for and development of a way to organize research and information in a way that was accessible and user-friendly says a lot about his ability to think on a global level.
Now that we have the Internet and the World Wide Web at our fingertips, it is no surprise that new discoveries and research have taken on new life and speed. Information is power, and we have more organized and accessible information now more than ever.
Chapter four of Mediamorphosis: Understanding new Media, did an excellent job of outlining the history and background of technology. I don't feel like I took much new information away from this reading, but it did reinforch some very important points. The way it outlined both the social and technical history of of technological advances gave a good overall view of how technology advances. Instead of isolating each technology, you really get a sense of how one plays off another. I was also reminded that technological advances are not solely based on technology, but on the needs of the time and who had access to the technology. Just as Alexander Grand Bell did not expect the phone to be used the way in which it is today, there was a need and a demand that it filled.
I found myself thinking of technology as a tree, where each ring was a new technology. I use this metaphor because without the previous rings, the new ring could not grow. The chapter mentioned the railroad, maybe not something I would have thought to be connected to technological development, but other ideas and innovations in communications technology were brought to life in-part because of it. I don't think there is any one comunications technology that can stand alone without those previous "rings" to support it. There is a technological core, that new innovations and development build upon.
posted by Jeanne Allen @ 7:33 AM
2 Comments:
At 1:16 PM,
Kevin Laverty said…
Not a bad analogy using the tree. Of course, we're focused on communication and while Guttenberg's press is obviously part of the building blocks - a tree ring, it is interesting to see how the railroads made the imperative for the diffusion of the technology.
Of course the telegraph's predecessor, the semaphore, was designed for military purposes and used the telescopes/spyglasses and a series of moving levers in varying positions to carry a signal down the line, as it were.
The important point you suggest, Jeanne, is that technologies do not exist in a vacuum and do play off one another in their development. However, I am still of the mind that, historically speaking, the ultimate supervening social necessity is war. It was the military that pushed on the development of the semaphore which, for all intents and purposes, was the forerunner to the telegraph.
So this does raise the question - was the ARPANET-to-Internet development a consequence of the diffusion of the personal computer or simply the effort to share research among universities and governmental entities which ultimately led to a broader reach?
My answer would be that without an embedded base of terminals with potential users, it could have stayed connecting only major research universities. However, once business saw the possibilities, the old LLC principle kicked in, that is to say, "there's a market for this here thang!"
At 5:57 PM,
Anonymous said…
Your tree analogy is really apt. There are also many small trees that die out--technologies that never make it because they're unhealthy to begin with, crowded out by other technologies, or can't get the resources they need.
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