[ExI] it's better than it used to be

[Stefano Vaj]

2011/4/27 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
> But look what we did get: a new technology for getting
> information into the home which is so good and so effective, many of us
> don’t want to go chasing off somewhere else, even if we could fly out of our
> own driveway.

Internet has been a big societal change, both intrinsically and in how
we have ended up using it. But what exactly is so revolutionary in
comparison with what could be envisioned in the Marconi's era?

All the basic theory with regard to computing, electromagnetic or
optical telecommunication, digital representation of texts, images and
sounds, etc. was already in place. It might even be argued that for
some of its entertainment value we are sustituting simulacrum to the
real thing as far as hard technology is concerned.

> They struggled so hard to get
> that, and yet along comes Wikipedia in our own lifetimes, we put together
> something that actually is better than Hari Seldon’s Encyclopedia Galactica,
> all put together in a few years by volunteers.

This sounds quite complacent. The *invention of writing* is a paradigm
shift. Less so the invention of printing. Even less so the fact of
having a rather trivial database of dubious "encyclopedic"
information. And, btw, the importance of Wikipedia is already
increasingly reduced by the improvement of search engines.

If we get excited about Wikipedia, what should we say about the
development or discovery of evolution, human flight, quantum
mechanics, internal combustion engines, micro-organisms, nuclear
reactions, DNA, mendelian laws, computing, microscopes, vaccins,
mutations, antibiotics, cable and air electromagnetic transmissions,
the power grid, the rocket, the submarine, the relativity, etc.?

My contention is that the future could have been, and still could be,
what it used to be. The problem of course is that not any *present* is
able to produce any future.

Be it technology or pure science, a relative stagnation as to
fundamentals (say, from theoretical physics to transportation
technology to genetic engineering to computing interfaces to energy
production...) is perfectly compatible with a flourishing of
increasingly refined applications of what we already have. Not to
mention with escape in surrogates.

Take "velocity", of which Italian futurism made a big issue as the
very symbol of the "new world" Marinetti and the other wanted to come.
During my grand-mother's life the speed record on wheel, on water, on
the sea, in space, increased tenfold, and so the *average* speed one
could move from place A to place B. Since the seventies, not only did
nothing like that happened, but if the records remain the same the
speed in average has been probably even *reduced* (traffic jams in
cities, road speed limits, no more supersonic airlines flights, no
more hypersonic military jets, etc.).

Of course, one can find rationales behind that. So what? A rationale
is a post-factum justification of trends which are in place, based on
the dominant values and perceptions. Exactly what I do not like in the
first place.

-- 
Stefano Vaj