Here's a follow-up on my post #14714 --by Management Guru Peter Drucker!
theatlantic.com
Excerpt:
With these major new technologies came major new social institutions: the modern postal service, the daily paper, investment banking, and commercial banking, to name just a few. Not one of them had much to do with the steam engine or with the technology of the Industrial Revolution in general. It was these new industries and institutions that by 1850 had come to dominate the industrial and economic landscape of the developed countries.
This is very similar to what happened in the printing revolution -- the first of the technological revolutions that created the modern world. In the fifty years after 1455, when Gutenberg had perfected the printing press and movable type he had been working on for years, the printing revolution swept Europe and completely changed its economy and its psychology. But the books printed during the first fifty years, the ones called incunabula, contained largely the same texts that monks, in their scriptoria, had for centuries laboriously copied by hand: religious tracts and whatever remained of the writings of antiquity. Some 7,000 titles were published in those first fifty years, in 35,000 editions. At least 6,700 of these were traditional titles. In other words, in its first fifty years printing made available -- and increasingly cheap -- traditional information and communication products. But then, some sixty years after Gutenberg, came Luther's German Bible -- thousands and thousands of copies sold almost immediately at an unbelievably low price. With Luther's Bible the new printing technology ushered in a new society. It ushered in Protestantism, which conquered half of Europe and, within another twenty years, forced the Catholic Church to reform itself in the other half. Luther used the new medium of print deliberately to restore religion to the center of individual life and of society. And this unleashed a century and a half of religious reform, religious revolt, religious wars.
At the very same time, however, that Luther used print with the avowed intention of restoring Christianity, Machiavelli wrote and published The Prince (1513), the first Western book in more than a thousand years that contained not one biblical quotation and no reference to the writers of antiquity. In no time at all The Prince became the "other best seller" of the sixteenth century, and its most notorious but also most influential book. In short order there was a wealth of purely secular works, what we today call literature: novels and books in science, history, politics, and, soon, economics. It was not long before the first purely secular art form arose, in England -- the modern theater. Brand-new social institutions also arose: the Jesuit order, the Spanish infantry, the first modern navy, and, finally, the sovereign national state. In other words, the printing revolution followed the same trajectory as did the Industrial Revolution, which began 300 years later, and as does the Information Revolution today.
What the new industries and institutions will be, no one can say yet. No one in the 1520s anticipated secular literature, let alone the secular theater. No one in the 1820s anticipated the electric telegraph, or public health, or photography.
The one thing (to say it again) that is highly probable, if not nearly certain, is that the next twenty years will see the emergence of a number of new industries. At the same time, it is nearly certain that few of them will come out of information technology, the computer, data processing, or the Internet. This is indicated by all historical precedents. But it is true also of the new industries that are already rapidly emerging. Biotechnology, as mentioned, is already here. So is fish farming. [...]
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BTW, this correlation between technological innovation and social innovation is a pivotal issue in understanding the respective receptivenesses to ITs in different regions like Europe, the U.S., China, etc.
A couple of years ago, I developed a theory of mine as to why pre-Colombian civilizations --ie Aztecs, Mayas, Toltecs, Zapotecs, and the like-- didn't "invent the wheel". I disagree with the common assumption that claims that the usage of wheeled vehicles by, say, the Mayas was irrelevant since no beast of burden was available in Latin America, that is, neither ox nor horse existed in America before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores --only frail llamas.
Such a throwaway excuse does not hold water as one realizes that all the pre-Colombian societies were based on slave labor and therefore could readily employ their conquered workforce as 'yoke humans' --just as in Ancient Egypt. Besides, archeologists have found toy cars which likely belonged to the aristocracy's progeny and which shows us that, at least, Mayas weren't so stupid as to not even know what the 'wheel' was all about....
Hence my maverick theory: pre-Colombian people didn't WANT to 'invent the wheel' because such a disruptive technology would have incidentally challenged their social fabric. The Inca Kingdom, for instance, relied on the tlamlele corporation, that is, thousands of low-caste runners who carried jewelry, foodstuff, and other items along the Chilean Andes --by foot. The aristocracy couldn't afford to discard its runners, especially if their social usefulness was moreover a divine stipulation.... Similarly, present day Europe does not want to invent Information Technologies for, like in pre-Colombian America, it might spark unrest in its social fabric. Your take?
Gus. |
