WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Remembering the Blight

The monoculture discussion has raised some interesting points. I really like the reference Sean Gallagher makes back to the problems of the Irish potato famine and it's causes, as well as to the Maginot line. It's high time technologists heeded Santayana. He says:

Monocultures have spelled trouble throughout history. My ancestors who brought the Gallagher name to the US came here in the wake of the failure of a monoculture--potatoes, which that supplied an inordinate percentage of the food supply, were susceptible to a fungus "blight". The failure of potato crops had a disasterous effect that Ireland, it could be argued, only really recovered from at the end of the 20th century. ... Windows is the potato of the Internet age.

Reading Sean's piece led me to Jon Udell's observation of how few of the 'conventional' media outlets carried a link to the actual CCIA paper or web page - the hatred of letting people link away from their web pages serves no-one. Jon says:

Folks who consume news by way of blogs are likelier to be exposed to primary sources than folks who rely on conventional news sources. Of course everyone's time is finite, so I'm sure those primary sources often go unread, but at least they're available. When conventional news websites don't bother, they make themselves much less valuable.

And finally, the trawl led me to a fascinating paper by Phoebe Sengers at Cornell in which she talks about the way that kitchen appliances continue to apply the modernism of the past in a way that is maybe no longer appropriate:

But things do not necessarily need to be this way. By becoming aware of our culture’s tendencies in appliance design, we can make a conscious decision of which tendencies we wish to encourage, and which we would like to actively discourage ... By designing with reference to history, we create the opportunity to make conscious decisions about which parts of history we would like to repeat – and which we would choose to leave behind.

Maybe another solution to the monoculture problem we currently face is the application of the 'critical technical practices' of which Phoebe is a proponent?

posted at 1:52 PM (UK) | |