Flying and walking: May 25, 1998 issue of New Thinking

May 25, 1998 New Thinking:
Flying and walking

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May 25, 1998

Flying and walking

By Gerry McGovern

Sitting in a plane flying from Joensuu in Finland to Dublin in Ireland, the following question occurred to me: Why is it that things that fly (or for that matter, things that swim) did not evolve into the dominant species, as against things that walked?

The human being is neither the largest nor the fastest living thing on earth and yet we are the most dominant. We have achieved that position because of our intelligence and our capacity to work together.

Today, I can see two major trends: things are getting bigger and things are getting faster. All around us are mergers and acquisitions. It’s a little ironic isn’t it that in the age of the Internet, the centers of power are growing.

The Internet, by its very design, is one of the most decentralized structures in human invention. So, why are all the businesses still converging? Is it in a search for greater power and economies of scale, or is it because of a fear of the future, a lemming-like reaction of ‘the competition’s doing it, we better too’?

Things are getting faster driven by the ever-increasing speeds of computer chips. New products get old within a year. I read an article by digital age guru Nicholas Negroponte, in which he boasted that his book ‘Being Digital’ only took him only six weeks to write. I enjoyed his book very much. However, maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think that taking so little time is something to boast about.

Microsoft made a decision to call its operating software by the year it came out (or thereabouts). So, we have Windows 95 and 98. It’s interesting that such important software is being as much defined by a year as what it does. It would seem that the driving motivation is not so much to get the software right but to get it to the market on time.

In Silicon Valley, we’re all told that ‘speed is God and time is the devil.’ And like it or not we’re all caught in that rush. Software, which is the foundation stone upon which the digital age is built, is being rushed out to meet marketing deadlines rather than technical or quality standards.

Nowhere is there time for reflection. The tech media is so busy announcing the launch of this and that, that it rarely has time to probe. The future is happening so quickly that we have no time to look ten/twenty years ahead and ask: What sort of society will our children inherit from us?

In the last three days I’ve been over to LA and back to Dublin. (And it’s all the Internet’s fault – so much for the ‘death of distance!’) On the plane I got talking to a photographer. He told me about how he was excited by the Internet but that he found it frustrating. He couldn’t find what he was looking for, he confided.

I agreed that the Internet could be frustrating but explained that searching is a skill that takes time to learn. I said to him that supposing I had taken as long learning how to take a photograph as he had taken learning how to search the Internet, would I make a good photographer?

He paused, put his hand up to his face, then laughed.

Gerry McGovern

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In Silicon Valley, we’re all told that ‘speed is God and time is the devil.’