Sometimes it makes no sense to us why certain technologies take hold when they do and even less sense when we learn that “new” technologies turn out to be rediscovered “old” technologies. Consider cement, perhaps one of the best known examples of a technology that was developed, widely used, virtually disappeared, and then re-emerged as a novel technology centuries later. Cement was used extensively throughout the Roman Empire and then seems to have been almost forgotten (i.e. there are almost no written historical references to its use) until mid-European engineers started recording formulas and directions for its use in the 18th century.
As an ardent follower of the development of information technology for nearly two decades, I’ve seen similar emergences/disappearances/re-emergence of several technologies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s some colleagues and I were tracking and developing technologies for collaborative writing. We were positive that these technologies were about to break through. It made perfect sense to us; we had the tools to do it, and we felt that the incentive to adopt the technology was there. It turned out we were wrong. Collaborative writing tools didn’t really start to take off until the end of the 2000s. Around the same time that we were playing around with collaborative writing, Netscape was developing interesting tools that looked set to transform web browsing into a significantly more social experience than it was at the time. Well, we all know what happened to Netscape, and the web didn’t really start getting social to any notable extent until the mid 2000s.
A lot has been written about factors that affect technology adoption – turns out it’s a strange and constantly changing mixture of context, society, economy and serendipity. ‘Nuff said. But, what affects technology abandonment and why does it seem that we sometimes abandon technologies in a way that either immediately or eventually seems to work against our interests? Well, here’s an interesting article that discusses exactly that in a very interesting and relevant context – the Hunger Games books. Apparently, some readers have been questioning why a future society with various technologies that seemingly surpass our current technological capability, don’t have some technologies that we consider basic today; such as the Internet. The authors and specialists that they spoke with make an important point; that one technology is not inherently better than another. When the nature of our problems change, our requirements for tools change and we go off looking for something new and shedding the old.
