Thomas Baekdal has a nice schematic history of news and information from 1800 to 2020. I like his 1900-1960 entry:

By the year 1900, the newspapers and magazine had revolutionized how we communicated. Now we could get news from places we have never been. We could communicate our ideas to people we had never seen. And we could sell our products to people far away.

You still had to go out to talk other people, but you could stay on top of things, without leaving the city. It was amazing. It was the first real revolution of information. The world was opening up to everyone.

During the next 60 years the newspapers dominated our lives. If you wanted to get the latest news, or tell people about your product, you would turn to the newspapers. It seemed like newspapers would surely be the dominant source of information for all time to come.

Except that during the 1920s a new information source started to attract people’s attention – the Radio. Suddenly you could listen to another person’s voice 100 of miles away. But most importantly, you could get the latest information LIVE. It was another tremendous evolution is the history of information. By 1960’s the two dominant sources of information was LIVE news from the Radio and the more detailed news via newspapers and magazines.

It was really great times, although some meant that “The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio is simply to get out better papers”, an argument that we would hear repeatedly for the next 50 years.

The stuff about 2020 seems very familiar.

Via Lone Gunman.

Joe Klein on Iran and the USSR:

Pete Wehner has a post at the Commentary blog comparing Iran in 2009 to the Soviet Union of the 1980’s which, of course, is completely ridiculous. I visited Russia back in the day and I’ve now visited Iran twice. There is no comparison. The Soviet Union was the most repressive place I’ve ever been; its residents lived in constant terror. I’ll never forget my first translator in Moscow telling me that his parents had trained him never to smile in public–it could easily be misinterpreted and then he’d be off to the Gulag. There was no internet in those days, no cellphones, no facebook or twitter.

Iran, by contrast, is breezy with freedom. It is certainly freer now, despite Ahmadinejad, than it was when I first visited in 2001. There are satellites dishes all over the place, which bring accurate news via BBC Persia and the Voice of America. The place is awash in western music, movies and books. The Supreme Leader has a website; ayatollahs are blogging. You can get the New York Times and CNN online. (I was interested to find, however, that most blogs except those, like this one, that are associated with a mainstream media outlet, are filtered by the government.) There is, in fact, marginally more freedom of expression in Iran than in some notable U.S. allies, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia–although the danger of imprisonment always exists if a journalist or politician takes it a step too far for the Supreme Leader’s watchdogs.

I wonder, though — to what extent can media consumption, or even production, be a proxy for (or index of) material freedom? I mean, the reformists in Iran are actually fighting FOR a loosening of some of the more oppressive restrictions. In particular, women almost certainly had more day-to-day freedoms (apart from media consumption) under the USSR then they do in present-day Iran.

I appreciate Klein’s point here, and trust me — I don’t in any way underestimate the power of the free circulation of information as constitutive of some degree of liberty. I just worry when people who deal in information – especially journalists – confuse the freedom of information with freedom as such. (Klein’s B-story about the two states, which explains the likelihood of getting imprisoned for arbitrary reasons or dissent – is way more relevant.)

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009. (AP Photo)

And curse the men’s cowardice with the light of their courage.

A backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi helps evacuate an injured riot-police officer during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)

Gavin at Wordwright, responding to this photo, via The Big Picture:

This is beyond words. A demonstrator is protecting a man sent to attack him. There are photos of the wounded and dead, but there are more pictures like this as well.

When you no longer need to kill your enemy, then the revolution becomes possible.

Kottke on Gawande:

I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought of surgery as primarily a cerebral pursuit; a great surgeon is so because he’s clever and smart. A short passage from Gawande’s [commencement] address reveals that perhaps that’s not the case:

In surgery, for instance, I know that I have more I can learn in mastering the operations I do. So what does a surgeon like me do? We look to those who are unusually successful — the positive deviants. We watch them operate and learn their tricks, the moves they make that we can take home.

So surgeons learn surgery in the same way that kids learn Kobe Bryant’s post moves from SportsCenter highlights?

Actually, Gawande reminds me a little bit of Tony Gwynn’s method of obsessively recording pitchers to see what pitches they might use against him:

What began as a casual “let’s take a look at how I swing” Has developed into a Spielberg-like production.

On the road, Gwynn carries two extra bags packed with video equipment and supplies. He has tapes of himself against every pitcher he has faced in the National League, showing every at-bat he has been able to film.

In his hotel room, before every game, he uses a small video replay machine to review the tape of that night’s pitcher.

“I kind of take things to an extreme,” said Gwynn, who edits and compiles his own tapes. “I know all I have to do is see the ball and hit the ball and I will put my bat on the ball. I know that, but it’s not enough…

“I don’t keep a journal. Most of it is mental anyway. Once you watch these tapes as much as I do, you know. I think I would be as good a hitter without the tapes, but this is fine tuning. I really don’t look at myself that much, but rather I look at how the guy has pitched me in the past. Maybe they will try it again, maybe not. But it will be in my mind knowing what they might do, and that is an advantage to me as a hitter.”

So I’m writing a short essay for a forum on the future of scholarship and the profession at The Chronicle of Higher Ed, I think on the New Liberal Arts.

Like you, i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about WHAT the NLA should be, but relatively little on how that would change colleges, universities, and the lives, research, and careers of professors.

So… What should I say?

I think anyone interested in technological change ought to read W. Brian Arthur’s legendary paper on path-dependence (PDF) :

Modern, complex technologies often display increasing returns to adoption in that the more they are adopted, the more experience is gained with them, and the more they are improved. When two or more increasing-return technologies “compete” then, for a “market” of potential adopters, insignificant events may by chance give one of them an initial advantage in adoptions. This technology may then improve more than the others, so it may appeal to a wider proportion of potential adopters. It may therefore become further adopted and further improved. Thus it may happen that a technology that by chance gains an early lead in adoption may eventually “corner the market” of potential adopters, with the other technologies becoming locked out. Of course, under different “small events”–unexpected successes in the performance of prototypes, whims of early developers, political circumstances — a different technology might achieve sufficient adoption and improvement to come to dominate. Competitions between technolologies may have multiple potential outcomes…

The argument of this paper suggests that the interpretation of economic history should be different in different returns regimes. Under constant and diminishing returns, the evolution of the market reflects only a-priori endowments, preferences, and transformation possibilities; small events cannot sway the outcome. But while this is comforting, it reduces history to the status of mere carrier–the deliverer of the inevitable. Under increasing returns, by contrast many outcomes are possible. Insignificant circumstances become magnified by positive feedbacks to “tip” the system into the actual outcome “selected”. The small events of history become important. Where we observe the predominance of one technology or one economic outcome over its competitors we should thus be cautious of any exercise that seeks the means by which the winner’s innate “superiority” came to be translated into adoption…

Under increasing returns, competition between economic objects–in this case technologies–takes on an evolutionary character, with a “founder effect” mechanism akin to that in genetics. “History” becomes important. To the degree that the technological development of the economy depends upon small events beneath the resolution of an observer’s model, it may become impossible to predict market shares with any degree of certainty. This suggests that there may be theoretical limits, as well as practical ones, to the predictability of the economic future. (all emphases mine)

Here Arthur uses the examples of nuclear reactors and steam-vs-petrol car engines — other classic examples are the QWERTY keyboard and the Microsoft OS, both cases where learning effects and coordination costs might lock-in an inferior (or at least quirky) product. (I’m also rereading Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, which takes a similar historical-accident-over-essential-function approach to design history.)

Alexis Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) points to an article by John G. Gunnell about the history of technocracy:

The term “technocracy,” though originated in the United States in 1919 by an engineer named William Smith, first became common when it was adopted by a movement that developed in the early 1930s as a response to the Great Depression. That movement, which for a time gained considerable notoriety and a substantial following, began with a group of technicians and engineers dedicated to social reform whose concepts were modeled on the technological republic in Edward Bellamy’s late-19th-century utopian novel Looking Backward. They were also influenced by the economic theories of Thorstein Veblen and the principles of scientific management growing out of the work of Frederick W. Taylor, both of which suggested, much like the later work of James Burnham in The Managerial Society, that politicians and industrial entrepreneurs should, and would, give way to technical elites. Although the movement may have appeared somewhat bizarre, it reflected a characteristic American faith in the compatibility of technology and civic vitality. The aim was to abolish corrupt politics and an obsolete economic system and expand administrative and technical rationality. “Technocracy” has been applied retrospectively to many of the technological utopias and dystopias that are so persistent a feature of Western literature and political theory.

It’s sometimes easy for us to forget that the early twentieth century was a time of huge media revolutions — radio, cinema, phonographs, among others — and that the engineer was very much at the center of it. There was also, I think, a really powerful charismatic quality associated with scientists, inventors, and capitalists, of the secular-aristocracy-without-history mode previously available probably only fully to generals. I mean, Steve Jobs had nothing on Thomas Edison. That dude literally appeared to be a magician. (For a great take on Edison-as-magician-inventor, see Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel, The Future Eve — part of the inspiration for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.)

Also, something I try to keep in mind is that then as now, “bureaucracy” is really used in two senses — both pejorative, sure, but functionally distinct. Bureaucracy can be cold, efficient, disciplined — in short, inhuman. But bureaucracy can also be petty, irregular, inefficient, feudal. You can be subject either to the impersonality of the machine or the fickle whims or incompetencies of an individual.

Traditionally, bureaucrats were minor officials, positions traded within and among families, indifferent to rules guiding their idiosyncrasies — think about Kafka’s The Trial, and it’s pretty clear that this is the kind of bureaucrat most of us truly dread. Max Weber’s model for the perfect bureaucracy wasn’t the modern office but the modern army. And when you think about the idea of a civil servant — professional, well-qualified, uncorrupt, willing to sacrifice for the public good, fastidious about following process and law — you can see the ethos of military discipline in a positive sense.

I wonder whether the idea and ideal of the technocrat – the true social engineer – is dead for us. What kinds of technologies would genuinely revolutionize — aw, that’s saying too much — substantively improve our politics, communities, society? Could an inventor genius somehow come along and charm us all once again?

Today Lifehacker brings us a ridiculously good idea. You make and refrigerate a week-or-two supply of no-knead bread dough. When you’re ready for a fresh loaf, you pull off a chunk and stick it in the oven for half an hour. Voila! Cheap, convenient, delicious, homemade bread! These folks turned this idea into a cookbook.

This io9 essay on Dollhouse reminded me of something I bet a lot of slightly-less-hardcore Joss Whedon fans didn’t know: Years ago, Whedon wrote a couple of action movie screenplays that got reviewed at Screenwriter’s Utopia. The review includes a summary of one of the movies (called “Afterlife”) that clearly prefigured the ideas Whedon’s exploring in Dollhouse. The premise changed a lot in the intervening years, but it’s somewhat fascinating to look at the progression.