Comments on: Why technology extinction is rare http://blog.longnow.org/2008/06/19/why-technology-extiction-is-rare/ The Official Weblog of The Long Now Foundation and Friends Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:53:16 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Paul Bowden http://blog.longnow.org/2008/06/19/why-technology-extiction-is-rare/comment-page-1/#comment-4773 Paul Bowden Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:08:58 +0000 http://blog.longnow.org/2008/06/19/why-technology-extiction-is-rare/#comment-4773 One of our developers mentioned the other day that I can still read punch tape code. It's a bit like press proof readers who developed the skill for reading entire pages of text mirrored in lead type. P One of our developers mentioned the other day that I can still read punch tape code. It’s a bit like press proof readers who developed the skill for reading entire pages of text mirrored in lead type.

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]]> By: False Data http://blog.longnow.org/2008/06/19/why-technology-extiction-is-rare/comment-page-1/#comment-4719 False Data Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:46:42 +0000 http://blog.longnow.org/2008/06/19/why-technology-extiction-is-rare/#comment-4719 Every set of technological, environmental and economic circumstances seems to create a corresponding set of engineering "sweet spots", such as the internal combustion-powered automobile (one that may be shifting as fuel prices increase and technologies for energy storage improve), the steam locomotive, blue jeans, or the layout of an analog clock's face. The technologies that fall outside these sweet spots tend to be blips (Pointcast, most Ronco products) or, if they were once widespread but the sweet spot's shifted, tend to decline in use (like the fountain pen, all-wood bows and arrows, the atlatl or, as you mentioned, flintknapping). That's not to say that they're not still great technologies that have some unique advantages--for example, the glide of a well-tuned fountain pen is a beautiful thing, and you can make your own stickbow in less than a day--but the context that once made them widespread either changed or never really existed to begin with. It reminds me very much of evolution and the rise and fall of species populations. Perhaps some of the modeling effort that's gone into that area of study would be applicable to the rise and fall of technologies as well. In any case, the context for the technologies surrounding digital information storage is shifting quickly. Part of that's a feedback loop: as our storage capabilities increase, they trigger a social change with respect to the things we want to store, which in turn drives changes in the characteristics of our storage systems. There was a time when WordStar documents needed to be small enough to fit comfortably on a 5.25" floppy. Nowadays, you can buy a cheap terabyte of hard drive storage for a desktop machine and sling video files around with abandon, but WordStar's document format wasn't really up to embedded pictures and diagrams, much less embedded audio and video, so now we have new file formats like HTML, MS Word, and ODF that can do it but would somewhat tax the capabilities of a 128KB, 4.77MHz computer. And part of it is a process of deciding what's important and what isn't. For instance, PDF exists to reproduce the layout of a document, essentially modeling the control that a typesetter or scribe has over text on paper, stone, or another solid medium. Whether or not it sticks around is likely to depend on how much importance we ultimately attach to that layout information. The importance of layout, and who should control it, is something we as a society are still coming to grips with in the context of static documents and have barely begun to address with audio and video. And the rate at which we come to grips with it depends on the rate at which society can assimilate and react to these new capabilities, which appears to be somewhat slower than the rate at which we can produce them. Every set of technological, environmental and economic circumstances seems to create a corresponding set of engineering “sweet spots”, such as the internal combustion-powered automobile (one that may be shifting as fuel prices increase and technologies for energy storage improve), the steam locomotive, blue jeans, or the layout of an analog clock’s face. The technologies that fall outside these sweet spots tend to be blips (Pointcast, most Ronco products) or, if they were once widespread but the sweet spot’s shifted, tend to decline in use (like the fountain pen, all-wood bows and arrows, the atlatl or, as you mentioned, flintknapping). That’s not to say that they’re not still great technologies that have some unique advantages–for example, the glide of a well-tuned fountain pen is a beautiful thing, and you can make your own stickbow in less than a day–but the context that once made them widespread either changed or never really existed to begin with. It reminds me very much of evolution and the rise and fall of species populations. Perhaps some of the modeling effort that’s gone into that area of study would be applicable to the rise and fall of technologies as well.

In any case, the context for the technologies surrounding digital information storage is shifting quickly. Part of that’s a feedback loop: as our storage capabilities increase, they trigger a social change with respect to the things we want to store, which in turn drives changes in the characteristics of our storage systems. There was a time when WordStar documents needed to be small enough to fit comfortably on a 5.25″ floppy. Nowadays, you can buy a cheap terabyte of hard drive storage for a desktop machine and sling video files around with abandon, but WordStar’s document format wasn’t really up to embedded pictures and diagrams, much less embedded audio and video, so now we have new file formats like HTML, MS Word, and ODF that can do it but would somewhat tax the capabilities of a 128KB, 4.77MHz computer.

And part of it is a process of deciding what’s important and what isn’t. For instance, PDF exists to reproduce the layout of a document, essentially modeling the control that a typesetter or scribe has over text on paper, stone, or another solid medium. Whether or not it sticks around is likely to depend on how much importance we ultimately attach to that layout information. The importance of layout, and who should control it, is something we as a society are still coming to grips with in the context of static documents and have barely begun to address with audio and video. And the rate at which we come to grips with it depends on the rate at which society can assimilate and react to these new capabilities, which appears to be somewhat slower than the rate at which we can produce them.

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