Please join a global dialog on technology

It’s been six decades since the invention of the transistor spawned a new genre of tools for work, play and communications. Science, industry and capital have trained fickle semiconductors to switch electricity on or off at will. This seemingly simple trick breathes purpose into the digital vocabulary of one and zero. Ingenious software, paired with advances in materials science and manufacturing, have created a global electronics industry that continues to touch and transform our lives.

Join me as I explore this technology realm. As a reporter in Silicon Valley I know a bit about the topic. I can point to samples from the articles I’ve written or tout my book. But keeping a hobby blog on media has taught me that writing online is less a lecture than a conversation. I have an ambitious goal — to track the many sub-sectors of technology, and spot opportunities and challenges. That’s too big a job for one brain. I need your questions, insights and criticisms.

My bio can tell you about my past but here I want to reveal how I think. I see technology as a process of iteration and look for forces, inventions or personalities that drive or impede innovation. History and experience are my guides. Consider how Japan rose from the ashes of World War II to become an industrial power on the strength of the keiretsu system. That tactic of creating alliances among companies, backed by government policies, has become the template for building technology clusters. During the 1980s Taiwan followed this formula to make itself an essential cog in electronics manufacturing. During the 1990s Ireland and India leveraged well-educated, English-speaking workforces to become service and software centers. More recently Germany used tax policy to start a solar manufacturing industry and South Korea has made itself a world leader in broadband internet.

The emergence of the World Wide Web as the popular manifestation of the internet is second only to the transistor as a technology catalyst. The Web has become a global switchboard that short-circuits industries and institutions. In the mid-1990s the Spanish-born sociologist Manuel Castells wrote ”The Rise of the Network Society,” a prescient work that predicted white-collar outsourcing, the globalization of labor, the enfeeblement of governments and the paradoxical re-emergence of tribalism.  (This interview offers a taste of his thinking.)

In 2005, ten years after the Netscape IPO ignited the dot.com boom, Wired Magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly put the network on a spiritual plane. In his essay, ”We Are the Web,” he saw the stirrings of a planet-wide consciousness, with:

billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.

That’s a bit mystical for my pragmatic sensibilities, but the abbreviated lingo of cell phone texting already hints at how technology is changing culture. We talk about digital natives raised on music players, MySpace pages, video games and virtual worlds. But what does that mean? An expert on media consumption has said that:

Media use is higher (in hours spent) than sleeping. It is the No. 1 activity we do in our lives,” said Ball State Professor Robert Papper, a former broadcast journalist. “People put on media shortly after they get up in the morning and then it accompanies them through their entire day.”

So in less than one lifetime the transistor has immersed many of us in a waking dream! Technology this powerful engenders new fears, including the not-so-distant speculation about what may occur once our electronic tools start using artificial intelligence to improve themselves.

But the global electronics industry has no off switch. Indeed, innovation and integration accelerate. Thousands of engineers in Silicon Valley design chips with billions of transistors. They ship their designs to fabs from Israel to Malaysia where billion-dollar machines make parts that may sell for a few bucks. Chip-making begins with silicon ingots smelted to excruciating purity and once they cool, software engineers from India to the Ukraine vie to write new code. Marketers from Tokyo to Manhattan devise products with short shelf lives, while investors from London to Hong Kong try to pick winners and losers.

To freeze such a process and pack it into a story seems like a fool’s errand. But by assembling bits and pieces, likes tiles in a mosaic, we may stand back to get a glimpse of this vast undertaking. It will at least be fun and fascinating to try.

– Tom Abate

 

 

 

 

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