Monday, September 3, 2012

Reading for next class: Wu, Tim. Introduction and Ch. 1 in The Master Switch. Post thoughts about the reading here for discussion. What was your take away from the readings? What interested you the most?

9 comments:

  1. After reading chapter one of The Master Switch I thought about what invention must have been like pre mass communication. The only reason Alexander Graham Bell gets credit for inventing the television is because he beat everyone else to get the patent. Daniel Drawbaugh may have invented the telephone nearly 10 years before Bell, but it will never be known for sure because there was no way to communicate it besides in person or letters. Important breakthroughs may have happened, but the world would have had no way of knowing if it wasn’t publicized properly. Today if something monumental is invented, news travels in no time.

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  2. The message that Wu repeated time and time again throughout the introduction was the revolving door of inventions. Each time a new invention was made, it was considered to be a revolutionary discovery. It was the one to end all inventions. This is definitely true with communication technological advances. First it was the telegraph, then the trans-atlantic telegraph, then the telephone, then the radio, television and most recently, the internet. Each time a new technology surfaced, it was gobbled up by a central body and regulated. This is true for all of the above technologies, except for one: the internet. It is still mostly unregulated by governments and companies. And if users are restricted in any way, there are ways to go around the blocked sites (though they do not always work and can be dangerous to do so). There have been recent debates in governments around the world about whether to regulate the internet, as they have with the other forms of communication. The two most prominent in America have been SOPA and ACTA, and versions of these two laws are already in place in other parts of the world. I think this book came out at the right time to determine what the implications will be if the internet becomes regulated like the other forms of communication, or if it remains unregulated.

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  3. In the introduction, I thought it was interesting to learn that Theodore Vail of AT&T perceived government regulated monopolies to be the concrete future of commercial business. The fact that Vail truly believed that the "good" in human nature, our will to want to help each other as a whole, would outlast capitalism and the strive for self-indulgence. The excerpt, "Yet I have always been struck by what I feel is too strong an insistence that we are living in unprecedented times," sums up my thoughts perfectly throughout my years of learning about history. The Internet IS revolutionary, but it's no more revolutionary, in comparison to the era, than when radio, video, telephone, and the phonograph were combined to form a coherent media presentation in the early 1900s.

    When Wu writes in Chapter 1 about how there was no single inventor of the telephone, and that Bell had to merely put many pieces together that were readily available to form a new product, it reminds me of the mobile revolution that is among us. Apple is trolling patents internationally at an ever increasing rate, trying to force other manufacturers to give them a stipend of their earnings as a result of patent violations. But, these patents are as simple as having a touchscreen on a rectangular device, as well as the act of using your finger to scroll through web pages and emails on said devices. How can such natural movements be patented? Because they're being performed on a piece of technology that was once revolutionary only a decade ago. Apple put the pieces together while simultaneously predicting where the future was heading, and because of this craftsmanship, they are successful, just as Bell was successful.

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  4. I'm curious as to see how these issuses of invention will be like in the future. As Nick pointed out, Apple is going patent crazy on technology that all companies should be able to use. Will in the future one company will own all the best technology just because they won the patent race? With the next big invention will there be a sole inventor? Or will it be like it was with the telephone where more than one person has a claim to it's creation. I dont believe in the idea of one invention ending all others, because something else will always be created. Inventions change the course of history, the internet was latest one, and now we are waiting to see what the next one will be.

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  5. It's surprising that the business of invention and innovation played such a huge role in the communications world we have today. This chapter provided some key insight into how to world of "unbiased" communications evolved. The Western Union election scandal is just crazy. How would history have been changed if Rutherford B. Hayes hadn't been president? If reconstruction hadn't been ended in the south? This chapter posed so many good questions. What would have happened if Bell had gone under? Would we still be using telegraphs? What if Bell hadn't infrigned on Edison/Gray's ideas and came up with them on his own? Would he have had more patents, getting him a better deal and by putting Western Union under even faster change history forever? So many cool things to hypothesize about.

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  6. Before launching into Chapter 1, with a discussion of the rise of the various technologies we have today, Wu makes a very good point. He says that people have to stop insisting that we are living in unprecedented times because, in fact, the 20th century was similar. Yes, the specific of the technology were different, but we must take a careful look at the ways in which staples like the radio, telephone and television developed in order to learn more about what to expect, what to do differently or the same with more modern technologies. It makes me wonder: What if Steve Jobs and Alexander Graham Bell has been in a room together? What genius could have resulted from that?

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  7. I think the ideas of sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations are an important part of the chapter, and an important reason Bell is now the one remembered for the telephone. While others were focused on improving the telegraph to a musical telegraph, and although Bell was too, he continued to design a telephone. He may not have been the first, but he was the loudest; and with the help of Western Union, Bell is known for the disruptive innovation of the telephone.

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  8. To hear of Theodore Vail’s belief that an economy guided by monopolies would therefore be an economy guided by the virtuous few, seems a bit far-fetched, especially in lieu of recent failures of industry due to unchecked privilege and greed. And yet Vail’s faith in man is mirrored by our modern faith in monopolies, or specifically the Google “empire”. Google does not fit in to the traditional trust model, a la Rockefeller and Carnegie Mellon. But it is still an information channel and business that seems to be everywhere. And no one seems to question Google’s expansive reach, perhaps due to Google’s simple motto of “Don’t be evil”. I still trust Google, and implicitly acknowledge that trust every time I do an online search or look at my email, but it’s still an interesting comparison to reflect upon.

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  9. I'll say this about the people in this chapter; Theodore Vail is my boyfriend's cousin. And then his other cousin, Alfred Vail, family to Theodore, helped Samuel Morse create the Morse code.
    With this in mind, this chapter really hit home for me. These were real people creating real things. I think our generation really takes our technology forgranted and doesn't appreciate where it came from. The radio, television and phone are not some magical pieces of machinery that appeared to us from the gods. Someone had to think of its concept, put it on paper, fight for the idea (as Vail did) and then create it.
    When explaining this chapter to my boyfriend, he jokingly said about his family; "Where did the innovation go?!"
    While this was just a joke, I think there is a little bit of innocent truth to it. I haven't seen many years and pioneers in my time, but I think the only person I can relate to this period of innovation is Steve Jobs. He created ground breaking technologies and made grand advacenments in technology that no one can compare to him today. I'm sure he faced the same challenges that Bell and Vail did; people may have thought their inventions silly and "out there." But they pushed through and look at what they did...

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