Again, you miss my point. This was one of the developments of the period 1880-1930, the period that I say was the most innovative, and totally different from writing by hand.
Well, supersonic flight was the basic idea…rockets and jets are not that dissimilar. A rocket carries oxygen to burn fuel in a vacuum whereas a jet does not.
The flip side of this question is worth considering (and may have been already in this thread, but I figured I’d just jump in).
That is, all the aspects of various SF futures that didn’t change much from the present that the author was writing in, but that we’ve already way surpassed. And you don’t even have to go back to the era of Heinlein and Bradbury to see this.
For instance, I just picked up David Brin’s Sundiver for a re-read. The book was written in 1980, and it’s set in 2246. The protagonist, en route on a shuttle spacecraft from Earth to Mercury, is mentally grousing about the readings on solar physics that didn’t reach him before he left Earth that he wanted to read on the trip, but will have to catch up with him once he gets to Mercury.
And I could only think, “why didn’t you just download them the night before you left? And if any of them were only in paper (in 2246?!) why didn’t you pay for overnight shipping so you’d have them right away?” It’s funny how SF writers and other futurists expected more from the future in some ways than it’s likely to provide, and far less in other ways than we’ve already got.
Futurists tend to be preoccupied with a few things: space travel, flying, video phones. But sadly, much that we used to have and still need are now neglected. Like the ability to reason and speak intelligently:
http://www.maniacworld.com/what-is-she-talking-about.html
I assure you the youths of 1880 could speak and write much better!
In other words, we have regressed!
Yes, you’ve mentioned that a half-dozen times already. It’s no more true this time than it has been any of the previous times.
And there’s far greater difference between writing with a word processor and writing with a typewriter than there is between the typewriter and a pen. There’s nothing you can do with a typewriter that you can’t do with a pen, and in fact, many things you can’t do with the typewriter at all, that you had to revert to a pen for. But with a word processor, I can change what I’ve already written with no additional tool, replace a word I’ve already written with another one (even a longer one), swap the order of two paragraphs, change the font, size, or even alphabet I’m using, insert graphics, charts, or tables… It’s a radically different tool.
Further, let’s not overlook that it’s also now the same piece of technology I can use to do all manner of other things. You can’t use a typewriter to make phone calls, or buy things from catalogs, or take pictures, or do calculations, or play games.
No, typewriting and writing by hand are entirely different things. Night and day. Horse vs automobile. It’s not just a matter of speed, it’s an entirely different thing. Handwriting is unique, typed pages are not (though I assume an expert might be able to tell microdifferences in type-written documents that come from different hands owing to strength of impression, but this would not apply to electric typewriters).
Sure, wordprocessing is an advance over typewriter, but that’s not the point.
Futurists are obsessed with speed and travel of various sorts. The concept of quality seems to be taken for granted. We need to devote more effort to improving literacy than to space travel, I assure you. Literacy (I mean in developed countries) keeps declining despite all our technological advances.
We live in the most literate age in history. We’re doing just fine there.
Not a chance. Have you actually read a paper by a college freshman lately? Or listened to a 20-something talking in a café? It’s excruciatingly painful!
Not to mention the drivel from academics.
Regarding Chronos post #185
Praise Cecil, somebody else is seeing the same posts I am!
Melchior Besides all else, this is a thread on retro futurism. If you want to complain about the state of literacy, why not start a thread in Great Debates?
Yup. We live in such a literate age that even the idiots are going to college and writing papers. If that same person had been alive a century ago, he probably wouldn’t have had any schooling past eighth grade, and would have lived all his life with the literacy skills of a below-average eighth grader.
I was complaining that we have become obsessed with gadgets and are neglecting other things. I think it’s part of the topic.
These are the same social classes that went to college 100 years ago. And it’s scary how badly young people today read and write.
Look at this, how people clap and hoot over this stuff:
it’s disgusting.
Why don’t we pay more attention to helping people to read and understand English (or whatever language they speak)?
Og knows why, but we’re still in GQ, so maybe you should check your assertions.
Here is a table showing the illiteracy rate over time. It was 17% in 1880 and 0.6% in 1979. Most of the improvement came from the black population, but even native born whites are more literate now than then.
But I give up also. TTFN.
Hardly:
I am not sure what they are measuring, but it does not reflect what I see and hear around me.
See this too:
Inventing an automobile is awesome and a radical change from the horse, true. That cannot be denied.
However, to claim that the dissemination of automobiles to billions of people worldwide is ho-hum and nowhere near as radical a transformation as the actual invention itself… that is pure folly.
So you’re right, Melchior, the potential for radical life-style change was more apparent between 1870-1930 than from 1930-1990 (or 1950-2010). However, very few people got to partake, and then only if one happened to live in certain parts of North America or Europe and not at all if you lived in Asia, Africa, or S. America.
Assuming the hypothesis to be true, I find that I’m not too upset about a slowdown in radical technological change over the past 40 years if it comes with a general bettering of the human condition, spreading the technological advances of the previous 60 years among the Earth’s population. If given the choice between flying cars and the elimination of smallpox, well, getting rid of the disease wins every time.
I would not deny that and have not denied that.
Of course!
Count me in the disillusioned camp.
I can remember threads just like this 10+ years ago (not on the dope, I wasn’t here yet). The defence given was of course the internet + mobile phones. Plus, importantly, a bunch of other techs that, if they panned out, could make a massive change to our health and quality of life.
Well, none of those speculative techs really has panned out yet, and again in 2014 the defence is internet and phones.
Oh, but this time, instead of portable computers and portable phones we have portable phone / computers. No disrespect to the many people (smarter than me) that were involved in that development, but it’s not surprising that many people feel like the OP.
So…once again there are many technologies poised to make a real difference to our lives: self-driving cars, 3D printing, gene therapy (still), stem cells, many parts of neuroscience, etc
Please god I hope in 10 years we can say more than phones and the internet.
I want my rocket-delivered mail, now! LOL