How Change Happens
Mary,
You said:
>I am convinced, just as you have alluded to,
>that this is the beginning of something important.
Then you ask me what I think about this. I'm a
professional historian by trade. Historians deal
in the study of change (or the lack of it) in human
societies over time. I believe change comes in
lurches, ones that people build up to slowly as the
material conditions of their existence change, but
ones that appear to explode on the scene as people get
a clear idea of where they're headed and undergo a
"world-view" shift. Indeed, I'm writing a book on the
subject, because I'm convinced we're going through such
a lurch right now. It's titled "Leaving Kansas: A
Guide to the Millennium". (The main title is a
reference to Dorothy's remark to Toto in _The
Wizard of Oz_.)
It is not, however, a book focused on the Iomega
saga. I don't think Iomega, or the Internet
phenomenon, for that matter, is the _beginning_ of
this large cultural transformation. They are only
elements of something bigger. Shifts in a society's
transportation and communication systems are always
pretty crucial to these lurches, so the Internet
issue is relatively important, but it's not a main
cause of what's going on. It's just a relatively
significant intermediate agent. Iomega is even
smaller, just a blip in the long view of history.
It won't even be mentioned in history textbooks
fifty years from now, though the Internet probably
will be.
Barbara Tuchman's _A Distant Mirror_ took a somewhat
similar approach, drawing parallels between the
fourteenth century and today. The fourteenth
century was when the plague and the Hundred Years
War hit Europe as the cultures there shifted from
medievalism to early modernism and merchant capitalism,
otherwise known as "The Renaissance". Tuchman was
more pessimistic than I am, though, and she focused
more on things like "great leaders" to "rescue" us,
whereas I focus more on technology and everyday
things like food, clothing, and shelter.
By the way, this "lurching" approach is commonplace
in my own specialty, the history of science and
technology. Some of you who've been using the
"paradigm shift" terminology here probably know
that the term "paradigm" was introduced into
contemporary lingo by Thomas S. Kuhn, a physicist
turned historian of science who argued that science
proceeds in "revolutions" rather than via steady
progress. I knew Tom Kuhn. He used to be my
next-door neighbor, in fact. You'll be saddened
to learn that he just died of cancer eleven days
ago. He'd never have endorsed the extension of
his ideas in the ways we've been using them, but
we are all in his debt nonetheless. He will be
missed in my profession.
The relevance of all this, if any, to this thread
is that it can be very dangerous to think that
change happens in the sort of steady, incrementalist,
one-little-idea-at-a-time way that we were taught
in our inspirational textbooks when we were kids.
It's easier to make sense of growth stocks if you
understand the "lurching" phenomenon better than
our eighth grade readers did. (You're smiling
broadly as you read this, aren't you, Young?)
My apologies to all for gobbling IOMG bandwidth for
this digression. We academics are compulsive lecturers.
Somebody please stop me before I drone further!
Cheers, Tom
P.S. I'm thinking about "publishing" the book on
the Web as "shareware", asking anybody who reads it
and likes it to send me five bucks. Anybody with
ideas on that, or about the book in general, is
welcome to email me privately (carroll@rpi.edu). |
