Riffing on an Arthur C. Clarke idea about the unpredictability of science, Kevin Kelly is musing about expected and unexpected inventions (via Infocult). Clarke actually created a chart of inventions or discoveries most scientists could have foreseen before they came about (e.g. automobiles, flying machines, telephones), and ones they couldn’t have predicted (e.g. sound recording, relativity, atomic clocks). Kelly does the same thing, putting organ transplants, the cell phone, and the test tube baby in the realm of the expected, and DNA fingerprinting, radar, and artificial sweeteners in the unexpected camp.
The criterion, Kelly explains, is the “perplex the ancient” test. If Da Vinci were brought back to life, would he be utterly mystified by the technology, or would he grasp the concepts behind it?
For instance, genetically modified crops would surprise no one, because the technique is simply breeding by another means. On the other hand, the underlying concepts of DNA fingerprinting would be mysterious, magical, problematic, and take great lengths to explain. The World Wide Web is the long sought after universal library and answer machine. But virtual reality doesn
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Thanks for starting with an easy question, Matt. Oscar Wilde would have *so* expected Millionaire, and Anna Nicole Smith and all that.
I really, really like the idea of making a taxonomy of innovation, but am deeply suspicious of the subjectivity of the criteria.
This question is harder than it seems. I have racking my brain trying to come up with a cultural phenomenon that is truly novel, to no avail.
Aside: Searching around, I found a link to commonplaces. Has anybody heard of this before? It’s amazing — they are seriously proto-blogs! Even more than journals (which are merely proto-Livejournals).
Anyway, back to the brainstorm…
Yup, commonplaces are good protoblogs. Check out, too, 18th-century journals (The Adventurer, The Idler).
I like the idea of checking cultural innovations. How about religions?
Commonplace books are hot business in early modern studies, especially history of the book. They had a brief moment in the popular consciousness in 2000-2001, when there were a couple of books about, I think, George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s books. That’s when I first heard about them, through articles in the NYTBR and NYRB. (Thank you, Gavin, for working at Schuler and getting those two pubs for free.)
The all-time greatest user of commonplace books was Shakespeare. This anyway is inferred from his use of commonplace quotations from other authors. (The Renaissance had a very different idea of plagiarism from ours.)
Two genius Penn profs, Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier, have a great reading of a section of Hamlet in their “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England” (subscription required):
Not only is Hamlet jotting down his bon mot for copying later into his commonplace book, but he’s using a special erasable wax tablet just for that purpose. After Stallybrass and Chartier made this hypothesis, they were able to find the artifacts themselves — books with specially treated wax pages with a metal stylus that had a sharp edge for writing and a flat edge to erase — sort of like an early modern etch-a-sketch, or the thin tacky paper that erases when you lift it from the page underneath.
Here’s a better, full quote of Hamlet, that makes it clear that he’s erasing and rewriting material into a book (as a memory aid):
While we’re on the subject of books, let’s look at the invention that’s arguably the most overrated and least original yet still the most important. (Like The Beatles and Nirvana). And that is the movable type printing press.
Pre-Gutenberg, people in the book-making business could have easily foreseen single-character movable type — after all, they’d already been using block woodcuts and type cut in whole words or single letters. It wasn’t all manuscript. They just couldn’t have foreseen (bum ba bum!) the social consequences of the movable type printing press, how it would give vernacular literature and wide bourgeois readership new legs.
The really radical invention is the codex — that is, the modern form of the book with a hard cover, bound and cut pages that you turn, etc. The codex supplanted the scroll, but only after a long period where it was gradually adopted by different communities. (The early Christian church, not coincidentally, were early adopters.)
There’s a great YouTube video about early users of the codex. It’s a Norwegian comedy sketch from a show called
Ah, that link to the codex video is broken. But this one still works.