Inertia
This is one of the things I’ve been thinking of quite a lot recently… Many people in this industry are obsessed by changes and mutations and I am a bit fed up with people only looking at stuff in terms of innovations, cool… What if we were looking at the two sides of the same coin? Technology hasn’t changed everything and certainly not deeply the human behaviour.
It remains me of this Pierre Bourdieu’s quote: “The social world is not a movement or a perpetual state of change. When I first started working in sociology, one of the most frequent words on sociologists’ lips was ‘mutation’. Quite quickly, I noticed that there were also continuities, and areas of inertia. I tried, with the help of statistical techniques, to establish on the one hand where the areas of inertia were (science is rendered possible through continuities) and on the other to explain them.”
And this is true is if you look at social world as well as if you look at the most important things in people lives. Technology hasn’t changed human beings main stages and developments in any ways, for instance teenagers will always go through a discovery phase at some point…
We should at least have a balance between what is and what isn’t changing in today societies. This will help us to have a clearer picture, indeed if you dig any deeper you could find out that despite the raise of social networks online, people aren’t having more friends but on the contrary you could discover that actually the more you communicate the fewer friends you have!
We also have to remember that modernity is relative and that you could find something old rather modern! There is a great discussion in Yasmina Reza’s play: Art that sums this up: two guys, Serge and Marc are having a discussion concerning the book De uita beata from Seneca.
“Serge : Have you read this book? Masterpiece, « modernious », once you’ve read this you don’t need to read anything else!
Marc : You used the word « modernious » as if modern was the ultimate compliment. As if when you are talking about something you couldn’t get better than modern. And I didn’t even mention the “ious”, have you noticed? Modern-“ious”
Serge : Don’t you find extraordinary that someone who wrote more than 2000 years ago is still relevant today?
Marc : This is what we call a classic!»
Modernity and innovation are relative; Alan Kay from Xerox PARC once said that “Technology is only technology for people who were born before it was invented.” There is a danger of thinking only in terms of new, innovative… and totally missing the point that if some things are actually changing we also have to take care of the constant ones to have a better understanding of how things works.
Très bien vu. Juste un brin de réserve car l’innovation est très souvent la résultante d’un problème bien concret (les exemples sont très nombreux) et étonnament lié à la vie quotidienne. Pour ma part, j’adore ce style de note vraiment planning (et cela se fait rare sur les blogs français)