Thinky post: paradigm changes
Jan. 13th, 2011 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexI am continuing to fail to write up the really thinky stuff I have in my head. As an experiment I may try to write out small stubs of the larger ideas and see if that helps or causes things to resonate anywhere. This will, therefore, be rambly and disorganized, mostly.
I think that the advent of widespread smartphones is a third major technological paradigm change in my lifetime.
There's a point to be made here about how this is the rich white guy's paradigm tour. Being a (sort of) rich white guy I'm hard pressed to say more than "this stuff happened; I didn't make it happen nor did I earn being born white, male, American, and well-off and all that comes with that."
The first paradigm change was getting online. My first email account was a Usenet account in 1983 and I've been online continuously ever since. Being online in that sense - rather than the isolated BBS online - was paradigm-shifting in that I became able to connect with brilliant people, people who knew things I didn't know, people who shared interests I had, and people who would ultimately change my life, my career, and the ways I see almost everything.
When you're interested in something obscure, whether it's science fiction about life on other planets, or playing music with recreated Medieval instruments, you can easily suffer from a lack of a community and in isolation an interest can die. On the Internet you can find hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people who like the odd things, who think the odd ways, who reinforce and support (and flame, and troll and all that, too). It's a paradigm shift to go from being one alone or one of a few to being one connected to many others.
A side point here is that being online changes the nature of memory. I have emails from long ago, and therefor a kind of memory of people and things I no longer remember without prompting. My electronic memorabilia is an odd hold-over; I no longer habitually file all email, in part because so much less of the important things people say to me is over email. But back then it sure was.
The second paradigm change was the alway-on Internet. I remember acoustic coupled modems. I remember measuring time in baud rate. I remember how things changed when we lived with someone whose workplace wanted him to be able to access servers at all times and so we got a household ISDN line. I've never lived anyplace since that didn't have Internet the way it had electricity. It's just there - you only think about it when it goes out or when, by act of will, you forcibly disconnect yourself from it.
Having it all the time means you think about it as a fixture and treat it that way. Rolling out of bed and checking the weather, or email that arrives without a laborious dial-up process, is qualitatively different. By removing the necessity for volition, the always-on Internet changed how I thought about and used that communication. Like electricity, it got wasted a lot more than when it was precious. I never said all paradigm changes were good, people.
There really wasn't much that I could do more with always-on net than I could do with the net before. That change happens somewhere around the advent of the Web and also again at the point where the Net goes from being non-commercial to being commercial. But those are gradual changes, and harder to pinpoint to a moment in my life. I remember trying to convince people that the Web was a really big deal and showing them the early Web sites of places like the Australian Museum of Aboriginal Art, and the Vatican touring exhibit site that the Smithsonian put online.
Now I have the Internet in my pants. Which is funny, and not. I have a device that means I don't get lost nearly as much. It puts data at my fingertips and because I carry it around it's not just always on - it's always... here. Not there. There is no computer room anymore, moreso than wireless and laptops made it be here. The phone experience is still awful; we now measure the Net in bars (of connectivity) the way we used to measure it in baud. Two steps forward, one giant step back.
But the speed isn't the point. It's the accessibility and the expectation. I now believe, and nobody thinks I'm insane for believing, that when I have a question I can pull a device out and have a good chance of getting my question answered more or less right away. I believe, and nobody thinks I'm insane for believing, that businesses, commerce, and services will all be presented to me on this tiny device so if I want to know the weather this coming weekend, or where's a good place nearby to get fixed the glasses that just broke, I can find out. Now. In my car, too.
That right-here/right-now expectation is the paradigm change; the mobile Net has less content than the Net on my desktop and yet it's paradigmatically different. I've talked about how, more than the flying cars and jet packs we still don't have, the Dick Tracy-esque nature of these devices convinces me that we really are living in the future. And I like it.
I think that the advent of widespread smartphones is a third major technological paradigm change in my lifetime.
There's a point to be made here about how this is the rich white guy's paradigm tour. Being a (sort of) rich white guy I'm hard pressed to say more than "this stuff happened; I didn't make it happen nor did I earn being born white, male, American, and well-off and all that comes with that."
The first paradigm change was getting online. My first email account was a Usenet account in 1983 and I've been online continuously ever since. Being online in that sense - rather than the isolated BBS online - was paradigm-shifting in that I became able to connect with brilliant people, people who knew things I didn't know, people who shared interests I had, and people who would ultimately change my life, my career, and the ways I see almost everything.
When you're interested in something obscure, whether it's science fiction about life on other planets, or playing music with recreated Medieval instruments, you can easily suffer from a lack of a community and in isolation an interest can die. On the Internet you can find hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people who like the odd things, who think the odd ways, who reinforce and support (and flame, and troll and all that, too). It's a paradigm shift to go from being one alone or one of a few to being one connected to many others.
A side point here is that being online changes the nature of memory. I have emails from long ago, and therefor a kind of memory of people and things I no longer remember without prompting. My electronic memorabilia is an odd hold-over; I no longer habitually file all email, in part because so much less of the important things people say to me is over email. But back then it sure was.
The second paradigm change was the alway-on Internet. I remember acoustic coupled modems. I remember measuring time in baud rate. I remember how things changed when we lived with someone whose workplace wanted him to be able to access servers at all times and so we got a household ISDN line. I've never lived anyplace since that didn't have Internet the way it had electricity. It's just there - you only think about it when it goes out or when, by act of will, you forcibly disconnect yourself from it.
Having it all the time means you think about it as a fixture and treat it that way. Rolling out of bed and checking the weather, or email that arrives without a laborious dial-up process, is qualitatively different. By removing the necessity for volition, the always-on Internet changed how I thought about and used that communication. Like electricity, it got wasted a lot more than when it was precious. I never said all paradigm changes were good, people.
There really wasn't much that I could do more with always-on net than I could do with the net before. That change happens somewhere around the advent of the Web and also again at the point where the Net goes from being non-commercial to being commercial. But those are gradual changes, and harder to pinpoint to a moment in my life. I remember trying to convince people that the Web was a really big deal and showing them the early Web sites of places like the Australian Museum of Aboriginal Art, and the Vatican touring exhibit site that the Smithsonian put online.
Now I have the Internet in my pants. Which is funny, and not. I have a device that means I don't get lost nearly as much. It puts data at my fingertips and because I carry it around it's not just always on - it's always... here. Not there. There is no computer room anymore, moreso than wireless and laptops made it be here. The phone experience is still awful; we now measure the Net in bars (of connectivity) the way we used to measure it in baud. Two steps forward, one giant step back.
But the speed isn't the point. It's the accessibility and the expectation. I now believe, and nobody thinks I'm insane for believing, that when I have a question I can pull a device out and have a good chance of getting my question answered more or less right away. I believe, and nobody thinks I'm insane for believing, that businesses, commerce, and services will all be presented to me on this tiny device so if I want to know the weather this coming weekend, or where's a good place nearby to get fixed the glasses that just broke, I can find out. Now. In my car, too.
That right-here/right-now expectation is the paradigm change; the mobile Net has less content than the Net on my desktop and yet it's paradigmatically different. I've talked about how, more than the flying cars and jet packs we still don't have, the Dick Tracy-esque nature of these devices convinces me that we really are living in the future. And I like it.
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 10:33 pm (UTC)Actually, in less affluent and often more pigmented communities smart phones are often people's only and/or primary conduit to the internet.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-13 10:42 pm (UTC)What I thought was interesting about the development of the Web was that geeks had been using e-mail and reading netnews for years, but when the Web came along, geeks created this thing -- sort of half con game, half self-fulfilling prophecy. The geeks told everyone, "THE WEB IS GOING TO BE THE NEXT BIG THING!" It wouldn't have been, if everyone had shrugged, and thought, "Geeks. Always excited about stuff we don't understand" and gone about business as usual.
But because some people believed the geeks and other people feared being left out if the geek prophecy came true, every business, organization, and university started creating a website. The web is far more useful when EVERYTHING is on it than it was when only a few things were available here and there. And now that even little businesses and organizations have a website -- e.g., even mom-and-pop restaurants have their menus online -- we can get almost any information we want.
But they could have ignored us. The big companies and organizations could have said, "Naaah. That's not gonna be the next big thing." And then it wouldn't have been.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 01:53 am (UTC)