Are we in for perpetual innovation?
September 29th, 2010 by davidw
Here’s a hypothesis that emerged when talking with Henry Copeland [twitter:hc] about a panel at Web2.0 he’s leading:
Previous media have generally gone through a period in which their navigational systems were unsettled, but then developed stabled systems that lasted for at least a couple of generations. Libraries certainly did. Television spawned tables of channels, times, and shows that are still in use today. Newspapers developed a semantic lay out and use of fonts that is so standard that for generations all newspapers have looked and worked basically the same.
So, will the Internet’s navigation systems follow the same pattern? Will they settle down so that over the course of several generations, the Net will look and work basically the same? Even within particular functional areas, say, search engines? Or will we be constantly innovating the basic navigational systems of the Net? Or, will some systems become settled  say, search engines with text entry boxes (and their oral equivalent) and lists of results  while there is wild innovation in other areas?
I don’t know, of course. But, if I had to bet, I’d say that we’re in for perpetual innovation, with some inventions lasting longer than others. The Net may be the exception to the pattern because of its scale, its complexity, and the ease with which anyone can innovate.
(This of course assumes we continue to have an open Internet. But that’s a hobby horse for another trail.)
I’m not sure television ever really did settle down. The pattern for TV listings became fairly standard in print, that’s true, but it changed a lot as the television information space grew from three channels to fifty.
More significantly, however, navigation systems for televisions changed beyond recognition when technology allowed navigation to happen on screen. The EPG allowed TV navigation to break from the confines of print, and for viewers to explore an almost limitless information-space (although 999 channels was the typical upper limit). Users could choose favourite channels, set alarms for specific programmes, see what was happening on adjacent channels – a big leap forward from the printed TV guide. And since then PVR devices have come along, massively reducing the temporal constraints that used to govern the TV navigational experience.
People from the early 1960s would find modern methods of navigating between TV channels mind-boggling, maybe complex to the point of unusability. If anything the TV analogy indicates that navigational methods will change in response to both scale and technological potential over time, and develop over the decades into something that we today would find difficult to use.
[…] (Compounding my feeling like a cat chasing his tail, I just noticed that Weinberger has already posted thoughts on our conversation last […]
[…] Are we in for perpetual innovation? "I don’t know, of course. But, if I had to bet, I’d say that we’re in for perpetual innovation, with some inventions lasting longer than others. The Net may be the exception to the pattern because of its scale, its complexity, and the ease with which anyone can innovate." […]
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I had to bet, I’d say that we’re in for perpetual innovation, with some inventions lasting longer than others.
Came across this quote by Lev Manovich, Software takes command, 2008, p. 63:
As theorized by Turing and Von Neuman, computer is a general-purpose simulation machine. This is its uniqueness and its difference from all other machines and previous media. This means that the idea that a new medium gradually finds its own language cannot apply to computer media. If this was true it would go against the very definition of a modern digital computer.
This theoretical argument is supported by practice. The history of computer media so far has been not about arriving at some standardized language – the way this, for instance, happened with cinema – but rather about the gradual expansion of uses, techniques, and possibilities. Rather than arriving at a particular language, we are gradually discovering that the computer can speak more and more languages.
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Internet can make a perpetual innovation maybe.
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