Quotes About Technology

It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.

In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

Before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time. (The elaborate vocal stylings of opera singing were in many ways designed to coax maximum projection out of the biological limitations of the voice.)

The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.

Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research.

They weren't off on separate islands, teaching creative writing seminars or doing design reviews. That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.

CONCAVE LENS (1451)

PORTABLE WATCHES (1500)

While the Germans intercepted and recorded many hours of SIGSALY transmissions, they were never able to interpret them.

STEAM TURBINE (1551)

But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology.

Steven Johnson

What we are seeing now is arguably the largest mass migration in human history, and the first to be triggered by a home appliance.

STOCKING FRAME (1589)

TELESCOPE (1600--1610)

if you look at the entirety of the twentieth century, the most important developments in mass, one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/ 10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

Hurley, Chen, and Karim cobbled together a rough beta for a service that would correct these deficiencies, raised less than $ 10 million in venture capital, hired about two dozen people, and launched YouTube, a website that utterly transformed the way video information is shared online. Within sixteen months of the company's founding, the service was streaming more than 30 million videos a day. Within two years, YouTube was one of the top-ten most visited sites on the Web.

Some will say that this is merely a matter of software, which is intrinsically more adaptable than hardware like televisions or cellular phones. But before the Web became mainstream in the mid-1990s, the pace of software innovation followed the exact same 10/ 10 pattern of development that we saw in the spread of other twentieth-century technologies.

This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.

The coffeehouse model of creativity helps explain one of those strange paradoxes of twenty-first-century business innovation. Even as much of the high-tech culture has embraced decentralized, liquid networks in their approach to innovation, the company that is consistently ranked as the most innovative in the world—Apple—remains defiantly top-down and almost comically secretive in its development of new products.

What we rarely do is recognize the way glass supports this entire network: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on screens made of glass. It's silicon dioxide all the way down the chain.

The towns might have lacked air conditioning and laptops and cable television, but they managed to keep their Toyota 4Runners on the road. So Rosen approached Prestero with an idea: What if you made an incubator out of automobile parts? Three years after Rosen suggested the idea, the Design that Matters team introduced a prototype device called the NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive.