I’m struck by this quotation in the 1982 Person of the Year article: ” As both the Apple Computer advertisement and the Las Vegas circus indicate, the enduring American love affairs with the automobile and the television set are now being transformed into a giddy passion for the personal computer.” Cars, tvs, and computers are intertwined in 2006 in ways we barely dream in ‘82. But in 1982, the provocate choice for the computer as “man” of the year was discussed:
There are some occasions, though, when the most significant force in a year’s news is not a single individual but a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process is changing the course of all other processes. That is why, after weighing the ebb and flow of events around the world, TIME has decided that 1982 is the year of the computer. It would have been possible to single out as Man of the Year one of the engineers or entrepreneurs who masterminded this technological revolution, but no one person has clearly dominated those turbulent events. More important, such a selection would obscure the main point. TIME’s Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.
It is easy enough to look at the world around us and conclude that the computer has not changed things all that drastically. But one can conclude from similar observations that the earth is flat, and that the sun circles it every 24 hours. Although everything seems much the same from one day to the next, changes under the surface of life’s routines are actually occurring it almost unimaginable speed. Just 100 years ago, parts of New York City were lighted for the first time by a strange new force called electricity; just 100 years ago, the German Engineer Gottlieb Daimler began building a gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine (three more years passed before he fitted it to a bicycle). So it is with the computer.
I come back to the 1982 article after re-reading Selfe, and am struck by the economic analyses and points of privilege built into the article. All the examples proceed from people with some privilege whose lives are added to by the new technology they had early access to.
Cut to 2006, and here’s another take on the power of technology:
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. (from the cover story)
And in Brian Williams’ companion piece, he worries “The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge … because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.”
I’ll come back to these stories later. Who’s the we?
Related stuff
- Pew Internet and American Life reports on the evolution of the Internet
