In Chapter 5 of What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, I found the “choice of returning to our early state” particularly interesting. “Citizens in developing countries can merely take a bus back to their villages, where they can live with age-old traditions and limited choice. They will not starve. In a similar spirit of choice, if you believe that the peak of existence was reached in Neolithic times, you can camp out in a clearing in the Amazon. If you think the golden age was in the 1890s, you can find a farm among the Amish. We have lots of opportunity to revisit the past, but few people really want to live there.” (80). The urban city is the land of choice and technology. As Kelly states, they are “technological artifacts” (81). We are so accustomed to a technology-based society that it is almost impossible to imagine our lives without the ease and comfort we derive from it. When I was a junior in high school, we went on a camping trip to a hill station in India. It was a remote part of town, so we had no access to the Internet. Even our phones and laptops were confiscated. It was certainly refreshing to experience the simplistic life of the area, but soon all of us were agitated and restive to use our hand held devices or use the Internet. We wanted to check our Facebook profiles, our twitter pages and so on. Soon the once refreshing and charming hill station became a place of nightmare because we could not live without modern technology. Thus, although one may criticize industrious cities with “rapacious appetites for energy materials and attention,” life in the city is considered the most desirable as people voluntarily “leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum” (82). With cities, individuals also experience freedom not present in a rural society and are confronted with a vast range of choices and opportunities for their development. In short, the “city as a whole is wonderful technological invention” (84).
In addition, the theory of inevitability is also interesting and thought provoking. The theory states that when “the necessary web of supporting technology is established, then the next adjacent technological step seems to emerge as if on cue” (138). However, I find this idea very problematic as it disregards human ingenuity and the efforts of great inventors such as Nikola Tesla, Edison, Marconi and so on. In Chapter 7, Kelly provides the example of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Before Harry Potter was released in 1997, several versions of the story were published by authors such as Neil Gaiman, who worte a comic book about a dark-haired English who discovers he is a wizard on his 12th birthday, and Jane Yolen, who wrote about a boy named Henry who attends a magical school for young wizards and must vanquish an evil wizard (146). Although there are certain similarities between these stories and that if Harry Potter, Rowling’s work cannot be discredited and written off as a mere inevitability. The intricate and particular details of the world of Harry Potter have been created and written by none other than Rowling (146) On the other hand, even though I find the theory of inevitability flawed and problematic, I concede to the fact that it highlights a broad framework of future technologies based on existing inventions.
DISCUSSION QUESTION: If, according to the notion of inevitability, most modern inventions and discoveries are either improvements or based on supporting technologies, is it possible to invent technology independent of past ideas?
I enjoyed reading your post! To answer your question, I do not believe that it is possible for us to develop or invent technologies independent of past ideas. Take the renaissance for example, the time period that the renaissance spans is viewed as a period of enlightenment and ingenuity in concepts, theories, and ideas. All these “new” concepts were based on and inspired by greek antiquity, ideas of the past. Like Kelly argues, the development of technology, although new technology seems to be authentic, it is really just a evolvement of a past concept, theory, or idea. We draw on the collective human knowledge of generations past in order to develop ideas and creations for the current generation. It is through this method that we are able to progress as a society and people. Without a foundation, it is impossible to build something. You can’t create a telephone without first having honed electricity. Even the initial creation of tools, as characterized by Kelly, was only created once humans honed the ability to eat. To paraphrase Kelly, our ability to create is dictated by the reality that we inhabit.
It’s definitely impossible, if only for the reason that past and present blend in to each other so much. meaning- what happens now is a direct result of what happened a second ago, especially in the case of technology. Just look at the progression of iphones. Technology right now is building more off of itself than of ideas, in my opinion. The trend of smartphones and tablets and the culture surrounding that is heading in a way that seeks to connect everything. People say that technology heads exactly in ways that are predicted, but really there are many minuscule forks where it could have gone one way but ended up going another. For example, technology now seeks to blend in with our lives (smartphones, google glass), rather than dominate them as it would if supercomputers had become staples in homes. Technology also seeks to enhance experiences rather than make them obsolete. In a way, these small divergences are not a product of a predicted progression, but of building on the technologies themselves. Data plans, ultrabook-type laptops, and windows 8 are all vaguely connected by this phenomenon. Is it really us that pushed for facebook integration into EVERYTHING or tablets becoming a staple gadget? It seems we have gone along with it, but the flying cars that we only have one more year to create according to the back-to-the-future prophecy have long since been shelved in favor of glasses that can auto-upload to youtube. I think we are still waiting for advancement to get back on track the way it was supposed to.
So, in conclusion, even if our ideas suddenly stopped contributing to the progression of technology, which is not likely, they will still influence it indirectly through the natural evolution of technologies that exist now.