Digital Information and Progress?
August 25, 2010
Progress is an interesting idea. I read the “A Smartphone Retrospective” and looked at the pictures on August 19, 2010. To be candid, I didn’t give it much thought. Math Club types, engineers, and Type A marketers have been able to cook up the progress pie for many years. In fact, prior to the application of electricity, life was pretty much unchanged for millennia. A hekatontarch in Sparta could have been dropped into the Battle of Waterloo and contributed without much effort. Drop that same grunt into a SOCOM unit, and he wouldn’t know how to call in air cover.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane.
Most people in Farmington, Illinois, not far from where I grew up, believed that the world got better a little bit at a time. The curves most people believed and learned in grade school went up.
Well, most people believed that until the price for farm output stagnated. Then the strip mining companies made life a little better by pushing some money into the hands of farmers. Well, the money dried up and the land was not too useful for much after the drag lines departed.
Then the price of chemical fertilizer climbed. Well, then the government paid farmers not to farm so things looked better. Each year the automobiles got bigger and more luxurious and those who wanted the make the American dream a reality left for the big city. Now Farmington, Illinois, is a quiet town. Most of the stores are closed, and it is a commuter city for folks lucky enough to have a job in the economically-trashed central Illinois region about one hour south of Chicago.
Progress.
What’s happening in online and digital information is nothing particularly unusual. The notion of “progress”, at least in Farmington, is different today from what it was in 1960. Same with online, digital information, and technological gimcracks. I realized that most folks have not realized that “progress” may not be the bright, shiny gold treasure that those folks in Farmington accepted as the basic assumption of life in the U. S. of A.
I thought about cows, pigs, and corn when I read “Throwing Out Software That Works.” The write up focuses on one sliver of the broader approach to products and services. The idea is that certain products are smoothing out some aspects of digital information. On the other hand, something is lost; for example, choice. In fact, the corporate filter is becoming more prevalent. The phrase used is “deliberate devolution.”
Let’s think about this assumption: devolution.
In a sense, it is the opposite of progress, which is to me gradual improvement. Instead of getting better, devolution suggests getting worse.
I think that’s as wacky as believing in progress. When I travel, I try to take a look at what “ancient” cultures left behind. I was in some run down, hot, miserable ruin in the near East. I walked along an excavated street and I saw what looked like gutters and water pipes. I asked my guide, who said, “Yes, wealthy people had running water thousands of years ago.” The architecture looked almost identical to the houses in use today at the foot of the Acropolis in that fine city of Athens.
My insight was that there has been change in some aspects of life, but in others, I don’t think there has been much change. In 1993 and 1994 when the browser caught fire, I was surprised that folks were thrilled over a function that had been available since the mid 1960s. The surprise was a realization of what people did not previously know.
What the essay points out is that “innovation” is often surprise. The shift from one surprise to another does not mean progress, which I am unwilling to accept as a foundational assumption of life. Nope, innovation is more often clever, convenient, or entertaining. Novelty is not a step forward. I found the USB storage device in the form of a plastic replica of a tuna roll particularly uplifting.
As users of gizmos realize that complexity is no fun, the clever folks introduce novelty. The emergence of iPads and other artifacts of 2010 life are not moving forward or backward. In fact, I have thought about the similarities of life in the US as more similar to the Dark Ages than the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
Digital information is not making much progress in my opinion. Here’s why in my opinion:
- Basic access to information has changed superficially. Most people don’t know good information from bad information. What’s evident is that convenience has more value to some than accuracy, objectivity, or provenance.
- The devices are similar to the forced obsolescence of US automobile manufacturers in the 1960s.
- The economics of the companies are focused on maximizing return, down-the-line costs are irrelevant or the problem of the PR and marketing folks. The consequences of the pursuit of novelty or other factor are another’s problem.
With MBA student learning from comic books and stunning unemployment rates in central Illinois, let’s think about the assumptions of progress.
My thought is that if one is a member of new elite (a phrase used by Esquire magazine in the late 1970s as I recall), life is pretty darned good. There’s work, money, and time to figure out new gizmos. If one is not a member of the new elite, life is not so spiffy today. Some folks can insulate themselves from the chaotic curves and manifolds that comprise existence.
What we have, then, is a frothy moment in which digital information and its accoutrements seem so darned wonderful. Life has not changed too much. Some folks have had running water for a long time. The “progress” is that some other sectors of society have gained access to conveniences.
The “progress” is a perceptual function. “Progress” may also be a characteristic of those in the upper stratum of society. You know. The folks with education, disposable income, legal counsel, easy access to credit, social connections, credibility, and a passport filled with stamps and visas from interesting places. Survival does not mean medical care. Survival means buying a new toy.
“Devolution” is the flip side. When a person used to getting a paycheck every two weeks, gets fired, life changes. If that person is not in the upper atmosphere, that person may find that the new normal is what most people cope with every day. The line between success and failure, progress and devolution, if you will, has more to do with “value” than digital comfort. Progress and loss of progress become trickier in this “value” context. In fact, without “knowledge value”, the old distinctions and perceptions flip flop and disorient.
The reality is that getting caught up in the moment makes it difficult to grasp the often narrow band of ups and downs in which technology, people, and society operate. Today’s newspapers reported on wars, economic collapse, business corruption, financial frailties, and lousy education. Here in Harrod’s Creek, a couple of school bus drivers got kids home at 9 pm. That was exciting. The Kentucky school bus system operates with a looseness that would have been familiar to the average Joe and Jane in Brundesium.
My take is that in many ways, we have a baseline in human endeavor and existence. The good news is that I can now read in bed without a night light. The Kindle’s black page and white type function on my iPad makes this possible. None of the Abe Lincoln reading by light of a wood burning hearth.
That’s progress I suppose.
In other ways, I am living in a digital bubble just like the folks with running water in that ruin in the near East did 5,000 years ago. Progress, therefore, is possibly a condition available to the upper stratum of a social construct.
Other strata’s occupants have a different sort of reality. Using an ATM is different from programming or owning an ATM.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
Freebie. Who would pay for this crapola?
Comments
2 Responses to “Digital Information and Progress?”
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Good “take” you silly old goose. Think you are on to something.
The big line seems to be:
The “progress” is a perceptual function.
Reminds me of a line in the Declaration of Independence. The concepts that stick out are pursuit of happiness and inalienable (or unalienable) rights.
But you won’t find the word “intangible”.
An intangible in our era is just another name for tangible once you price it and then you can take it away or charge for it or find a way to tax for it. Just start typing that in your search box and see all the suggestions for what you might mean.
My take is that a lot of rights – maybe all of them- that were once or originally considered inalienable are now calculable as intangibles.
I think that creates more sensitivity to the baseline.
Some countries are better at the inalienable rights part than the United States these days and although they had nothing to do with arpanet, I wonder if those countries have a different take on “Digital Information and Progress”.