Didn't Get That Right

The American Prospect reports:

There's an adage that says that technology invented before you were born is taken for granted, technology invented up until your twenties or thirties is exciting, and technology invented after you hit 40 is threatening. It may need to be updated given the speed with which changes in communication and information are happening. If you're older than 25 or so, you can remember life in the analog age, which is a constant reminder of how remarkable the changes of the last 20 years have been.... Last week, NPR reported that the Stanford engineering library is getting rid of its paper copies of periodicals. It's hard to argue with them, when fewer and fewer people are bothering to walk to the stacks to pull out a dusty copy of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

But I a reminded again and again by the statement of Peter Drucker who had referred to the presentation of McLuhan's doctoral thesis and McLuhan is quoted as follows

"Movable type, rather than Petrarch, Copernicus, or Columbus was the creator of the modern world view..

"Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors as McLuhan had finished reading, "that you think printing influenced the course's the universities taught and the role of the university, altogether?”

"No, sir, " said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed, printing determined henceforth what was going to be considered knowledge.”

That means that as the technology dramatically changes what we as a society view as its core knowledge, what makes our civilization, is changed, is defined by that new technology. Thus the day of scanning through journals and serendipitously finding that article that leads to that idea that results in that creation is replaced by scanning through Google, then web sites and finding similar gems. But now I can find gems not necessarily published in peer reviewed journals, I can see uncompromising ideas that were not watered down by reviewers. Journals have their place, but they are slow and consensus driven. Thus knowledge will change.

As for the technology, as someone near seventy, my first computer was an IBM 709 with a paper tape and frankly I am still frustrated with my super fast lap top and do work arounds and think the iPad is much too primitive but a step in the right direction. Things invented before I was twenty are probably not around, the old VW beetle, and rightly so, it was fun but a piece of junk, and since most of what I use was invented after 40 I still view it as primitive and keep pushing the envelope.

Thus the writer may have missed the mark.... but the writer is probably under 40!