New Technologies

Writing was with us for as long as we know. It would be difficult to imagine writing as a new technology. It was. Like many things that we take for granted, writing has to be invented. It was a new technology to the great Greek philosopher, Socrates. Socrates fears writing and favours speech. In the Phaedrus (Greek: Φαίδρος), Plato described Socrates' fears that writing will cause memory to atrophy and that writing is more susceptible to "abuse" than speech. Future generations will appear to be wise because they read much without being properly taught. Socrates himself never wrote anything; all his ideas were written down by his student, Plato.

Likewise today, we fear new technology. We prefer to rely on established traditional methods to manage our knowledge. We prefer physical books, files, signatures, something which Socrates considered as susceptible to "abuse". We are puzzled by Socrates' view that speech is more reliable than writing. Do we not always have contracts in writing with signature and seal? Imagine a spoken contract! Future generations would wonder why we consider books more reliable than digital storage, wikis, search engines and other knowledge-based infrastructure, jsut as we wonder why Socrates value speech more than writing.

I do not know what the Chinese reaction to the invention of abacus was. But I remember the reaction of our school authorities to digital calculators. Calculators were already invented when I sat for my examinations. However, we were not allowed to use them. We have to use the slide rule and logarithm tables. How many among today's student is able to use the slide rule and logarithms table? They all use calculators. Basically, the Ministry of Education just delay the use of calculators. They could not stop it.

When I proposed to my company to use Mediawiki as a mean to manage our internal knowledge, an e-mail came back to say that we have to consider carefully, the main considerations will be the Non Disclosure Agreements. Anyway, this is the expected reaction, just like the Ministry of Education or big multi-national company. Actually, the wiki may be a bit dated, being about five years old. I think there may be better ways, but I am not fully aware of them.

Big companies that do not change can look to the fate of the Ottoman Empire or the Ching Empire of China. You may break into pieces and die (like the Ottoman Empire), or you may float around like a broken boat without a rudder for many decades (like China) and hope for a new management to rescue you. For small companies, they can look to the small countries, which have existed and died, without history remembering them, which is why I cannot give you the name of any of these countries.