Wired's Kevin Kelly has an interesting post on the how early adopters of innovative technologies come to sour on their favorite toys. Key point:
"Many of the qualities that early adopters love -- the way it can be modified, tweaked, owned, and directed into all manner of directions -- and its unlimited potential -- are also the same reasons why many others shy from trying to use it. In the same way, the very hardening and convergence that draw the masses to a technology also turn off those who like its earlier kind of generativity, when things were lose."
To Kelly's credit, he doesn't simply make the point that technology becomes boring when it "sells out:"
"A device become more specialized and 'complete' as it evolves. As it does, it becomes more specific in what it does, more closed in its identity, more clear in what it is. It becomes more powerful in evolving its identity. As it matures it becomes more completed, more approachable, more understandable, more able to do things for more people."
A lot of tech writers have an tendency to glorify and romanticize the individual tinkerer and shun the mass product. But Kelly points out that while the creativity of the tinkerer is important, it also a product of a given technology's incompleteness. The same "closed" nature of the mass product that turns off the tinkerer can be a boon for innovation of a different kind. Usenet postings in the 1980s were certainly creative, for example, but now we can blog!
Ultimately, the cycle between the incomplete innovation at the edge of chaos that tinkerers can play with and the mass product that can (sometimes) enable new creativity produces a consistent margin of innovation inhabited by those who want to play with immature technologies.
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