I finished "Future Hype" this morning on the train ride up here to Cambridge - it was a decent book, and a fast read. The author's main point: don't believe all the hype you hear about how things are moving so much faster now than they ever have been.

My history reading has made me skeptical of that idea, and one of the examples given by Seidensticker is communications. Yes, the internet is an advance: but consider earlier communications advances, and where they took people. When the net came online, we already had news traveling around the globe nearly instantly, via phone, television, and radio. Now go back to the early 19th century, before the telegraph was invented - communications took days, weeks, or even months. Ambassadors back then had much more power and latitude than they have now; when the young US sent an official to deal with the Barbary pirates in 1805, he wasn't going to get new instructions from Washington for months - he was left to his own best judgement. In 1858, there was a transatlantic cable - suddenly, the President could give his foreign (at least in Europe) ambassadors new instructions anytime he wanted.

Consider that upheaval. Just within the foreign service ranks of the various powerful nations of the day: foreign office staff went from being powers unto themselves to being message carriers in an instant. When the internet really came into its own in the early 90's, it didn't have anything like that impact.

The book is filled with similar anecdotes, and should reset any thinking person's notions of how fast change is happening. The early industrial revolution, for instance, changed the lives of the average Westerner a lot more than anything that's happened in the last 50 years - look at the changes taking place right now in places like India and China to see a modern day example of that.

Technorati Tags: technology