Over on Eric Wolf’s blog, he writes an interesting post about the Internet boom phenomenon: Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time…
I have a slightly different take.
We all like to jump on the bandwagon when something is new and exciting. I’m a lucky man: I chose to be educated in a field which has been the source of many of these new trends, namely computer science. More than that though, I tried (and continue to try) to monitor what’s new, what’s coming down the pike, what trends are gonna be big. I’m an early adopter. I have yahoo and gmail identities without digits in them. I’ve been through six generations of cell phones. I created one hundred podcasts, and then got off the bandwagon. And you know what? It hasn’t really helped me make any money (other than perhaps my salary) because ultimately I don’t buy into the hype nearly as much as the masses.
As we sit poised on another of these “boom” product release (the impending release of the iPhone) and my livelihood continues to be dependent upon the boom of an impending movie release (Ratatouille), I can’t help but ask if we could develop a society which moved at a slightly more leisurely pace, which didn’t rely on the herky-jerky motion of “progress” to get us out of bed every morning.
In Japan, there are cultural movements which are a reaction to the breakneck pace of advancement that Japan has acheived over the last century. They want to adopt a different style of life, a slower pace, by choice. This “Slow Life” philosophy is governed by the following principles:
- SLOW PACE:
- We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
- SLOW WEAR:
- We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
- SLOW FOOD:
- We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
- SLOW HOUSE:
- We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
- SLOW INDUSTRY:
- We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
- SLOW EDUCATION:
- We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
- SLOW AGING:
- We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
- SLOW LIFE:
- Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.
We tend to admire growth. We crave the excitement of explosions, of boom and bust. We have accelerated our lives to the point that each of us will likely have multiple careers. We will make and squander fortunes. Marry, divorce and marry again. When we make a plea to have another boom, perhaps we should take a step back, slow down, and figure out what will really make us happy.
Oh, by the way, I’ve got $50 for anyone who will stand in line for me at AT&T…
[tags]Rants and Raves[/tags]
I really appreciate slowness. Once the dot-com I was at tanked in 2001, I was ready for life to basically stop. I sold my Porsche 911 (it was a classic 1986 with about 200K miles) and bought a ’74 VW Bus that doubled as my home as I spent the next six months doing yoga.
Doing yoga requires that you slow down to a standstill and then start rebuilding from there – physically, mentally and spiritually. Even the “fast” yoga styles like Ashtanga are designed to get you to slow down – these styles are designed to help slow down folks who are addicted to movement.
I’ve always been on the “bleeding edge” things and I don’t even try. I ended up in the geospatial world because, when I went back to school in 2002, I wanted to do something other than computers. I asked myself “what do I enjoy” and the answer was “maps”. I’m one of those people who can spend hours pouring over the details of a map. I really wanted to become a real “Cartographer”. Little did I know that technology was about to make maps obsolete.
And trust me – it’s happening. In cartography, it’s always been understood that a globe is a much better representation of space than a flat map. The problem is globes are hard to transport and hard to modify. But more and more people are consuming geospatial information via virtual globes (Google Earth, NASA WorldWind, etc). Because of the indoctrination of video games, younger generations tend to have a globe-centric view of the Earth rather than the traditional cartographic view. Further, GPS has all but made compasses obsolete – except as backups.
The only thing that’s really missing is the marriage of the virtual globe and GPS with a persistent data connection to dynamically populate the spatial information on the globe. Of course, that’s a modern cell-phone…
So once again, I find myself out on the bleeding edge. I’ve been studying cartography (ne GIScience) academically for the past five years – and I’m doing research in ways of using modern computing power to shed light on the inherent nature of Geography. But I find the pace of Academia to be tediously slow – and too often that slowness is due to personalities and politics.
Slowness can be good – when it’s out of respect for the complexity of the problems at hand (and the resulting complexity of the solutions). But slowness can be bad, especially when it’s out of fear.
P.S. I always use the “free” phone I get with my cellular carrier. I also usually buy the cheapest laptop on the shelf at BestBuy. To me, these are better indicators of where the technology is going than the latest gee-whiz toys. Pixar is a great example of this – there is absolutely amazing intelligence and technology that goes into the creation of what ultimately is a commodity product – and the significance of all that intelligence and technology falls way behind the mass-user experience of the story.
Ratatouille will be successful because it’s insanely cheap and ubiquitous (the technology to view it is fairly universal). Cell phones became REALLY important when they got insanely cheap and ubiquitous (especially in undeveloped parts of the world). Maps will become unimportant once the GPS+Virtual Globe+Datastream becomes insanely cheap and ubiquitous.
And that understanding comes from slowing down a little and not waiting in line at AT&T for an iPhone. Of course, after seeing just how bad the first iPod was, I’m definitely going to wait a few generations before even considering an iPhone!