I’ve long meditated on how the drift of commercial technology tends to be towards lowering the quality of the experience for the sake of convenience – decreasing the bandwidth in favour of reach, if you will.
Consider, for example, how people used to take in their movies by sitting quietly in dark theatres for the duration of the picture, which was projected on a huge screen. Not content with watching home DVD rentals on their televisions, they now watch them while multitasking on their wireless handhelds, on a screen maybe three inches wide, while waiting for a bus.
By the same token, photographic reproduction and audio sound quality reached their apex sometime in the late 1960s and have devolved ever since. The CD lost something to the LP. The MP3 file lost something again. And instead of “hi-fi” speakers you have earbuds. 140-character tweets have replaced shoeboxes full of handwritten correspondence. A crankier social commentator than me might say this was all presaged by the descent from the art of the Renaissance through blurry Impressionism and finally modern art created by the technically unskilled. Books and (gasp) magazines seem destined to be next.
The companies that bring you convenience (Apple) thrive and reward their shareholders while those that give you greater bandwidth (Imax, Bose, Livent) are lucky just to stay alive and offer no long-term return to their owners. I’ve been meaning to write a screed on the subject but I notice now that in the September issue of Wired, senior editor Robert Capps has beaten me to it.
“The Good Enough Revolution” details the many ways that cheap, fast and dirty beats high performance every time. Capps carries the theme beyond consumer electronics, noting how the United States military – previously the home of the $5,000 rivet – is increasingly relying on the cheap MQ-1 Predator drone rather than the higher-performance A-10 fighter plane. In Iraq or Afghanistan, there are distinct advantages to having lots of unmanned aircraft in the hangar that you can launch any time versus one or two winged Porsches that need a lot of training and downtime to operate.
The same goes for health care and even the practice of law, Capps writes, where innovative providers are growing fast by providing just the 20% of services that most people use most of the time, either over the internet or with networks of stripped-down satellite offices.
The one thing I’d add to Capps’s argument is that “good enough” is not a recent phenomenon brought on by time poverty; as in the movies example, it’s been going on at least since U.S. cinema attendance peaked in 1959, drawn down thereafter by the dubious lure of free black-and-white TV. In fact it could be one of those immutable truths of human behaviour.
The internet itself is the supreme example of “good enough.” Remember when Al Gore was talking about the “information superhighway” in the early 1990s? That was a much more robust, fully fibre-optic infrastructure than we have today. But governments never got around to building this new Infobahn (unless you count the Alberta SuperNet), or even coordinating the work of others. Instead the patchwork of existing digital networks that was the internet overtook and swallowed the information superhighway from below. Software developers managed to simplify the codes to just about everything so now we can watch the out-of-town NHL game of our choice for free on our home computer, connected to the outside world by a simple coaxial cable from our phone or cable provider. A bit choppy, yes, and poorly synchronized with the sound, but it’ll do.
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