At the same time, I and others are arguing that properly understood the internet allows me to resurrect that oral tradition, but in a wider more global way. In a sense through interactions and multi-threaded communication we create a pattern of meaning through story which is comparable with that of the shamans and story tellers of so called more primitive societies.

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I once saw Henry Petroski talk about the history of bridge building. From what I remember, there are failures roughly 30 years after a new design is introduced. As a design becomes successful and is adopted, engineers try to lighten it to make it both cheaper and more elegant. After 30 years, the generation that understood the limits of the technology have retired and someone pushes it too far. The result is a failure and lots of ugly retrofitting on existing bridges. Apparently, this trend can be traced back centuries.

I and others are arguing that properly understood the internet allows me to resurrect that oral tradition, but in a wider more global way. In a sense through interactions and multi-threaded communication we create a pattern of meaning through story which is comparable with that of the shamans and story tellers of so called more primitive societies. Writing with hotlinks represents considerable progress over the more staid form of the formal article, while the mass audit of peer review is if anything more rigorous that that of an editorial panel.

I think one difference with this technology is that it is more natural, its fragmented nature matches the fragmented nature of our intelligence and memory structures, but critically it also allows us to augment our memories through the storage capacity, but also the networked social interaction of the net.

These differences to what has gone before are substantive, truly different and important. We had better use these differences to make a positive difference, to change the "slope" of progress.

The generation shift seems much the same mechanism as a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
The Petroski bridge problem was extrapolating a successful design without re-considering the risk analysis. Petroski also wrote a book on 'the book shelf'; the way that books were used/formed part of peoples lives changed immensely over time, and I fear Doris Lessing was comparing a changing web with a snapshot of books.
Am unconvinced by Carr's argument. As he knows better than most, the pace of change in organisations is largely driven by IT stakeholders, and the people setting corporate culture. Companies that buy into 'corporate agility' (Grantham and Ware - www.thefutureofwork.net ) will move faster than those that don't.

Dave, a Happy New Year to you.

I've already blogged my own thoughts on this post, here:
http://www.psybertron.org/?p=1494
and commented on Julian's thoughts on Johnnie's blog, here:
http://www.johnniemoore.com/blog/archives/001915.php

But on "re-reading" your post I see an even more important thought in the quote from Mick Carr.

"Technology is generational" .... that is so true.

Technologies may themselves evolve, change and replace one another with frightening, ever quickening pace, but the "real value" they add does indeed depend on more human cycles. I have for many years pointed to "Kondratiev Waves" - the economic cycles since the industrial revolution that regularly show 80 year cycles. I equated these cycles to approximately 3 human generations - one to learn a technology, one to exploit (real value of) the technology, one to unlearn / learn anew. Like all rules of thumb its too much of a generalisation, but the human generational cycle is in there.

It's unpopular for the young bucks to swallow, but wisdom (of the baby boomers) does count for something.

Interestingly Brian Sherwood Jones above refers to Kuhnian paradigm shifts - these were strictly scientific paradigms, but Freeman and Perez extended this to Techno-Economic-Paradigms to account for Kondratiev waves that had been recognised since the 1910 / 20's. I'm effectively making the same point as Brian's first sentence.

If you are interested I'll dig out the refs.
Probably too much additional jargon for Julian ;-)
Regards, Ian

PS re-reading is significant ... each cycle (up to a point) adds not just more links but higher value links between the fragments. (I see these cycles of increasing value extracted as very much following the physical chemistry case ... three times is about optimum ... diminishing returns and additional risks after that.)

Thanks Ian - and yes the references would be interesting. Julian's comments on jargon were handled well by Johnnie's I thought. I will admit to a bit of surprise, I have know Julian for many years, tried to work with once on situational archetypes and he is close to the complexity community so I would have thought he was capable of handling more sophisticated language.

The wisdom of the baby boomers gives us a lot, in a sense our generation has lived through (and created) more discontinuous change than any other before it (and I suspect after) but we shall see.