Cwu1204’s Blog

 The evolution of communication and information technology comes from the ideation of the scientists, but it’s not the only crucial element in the whole process of evolution. The “supervening social necessity” plays a decisive part of the whole process. In other words, the innovative and demonstrably effective technology has to meet the needs of the society.

Even if the technology caught the society’s appetite, the law of “suppression of radical potential” is still another problem to be solved. The problem may cause “improved technology performance”, which leads to redundant devices and spin offs.  We could find tones of examples of the law of “suppression of radical potential” in the long history of communication and information technology.

The war between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD optical disc is just the most recent example of suppression of radical potential. These two parallel technologies meet the supervening social necessity, which is to store huge quantity of high definition video and audio in a single disc. They attract different companies in related industries, each form an alliance to compete with each other, which is also called spin offs. In this case, redundant devices supporting different formats caused unnecessary capital loss. Finally, the alliance shift and some other commercial factors ended the chaos. The Blu-ray Disc is the final winner and the format has been decided.

Similar communication technologies compete for the same market often results in zero-sum situation or highly competitive markets. Social networking sites (SNS) are facing the same problem. At the beginning, the idea of SNS sounds weird for many. However, Frindster reached the supervening social necessity and it is the first accepted SNSs. After that, new SNSs mushroomed all over the cyberspace within a few years. These parallel technologies truly come from the New-Market Disruption Theory. The new competitors imitate the precedents and made some minor improvement or new strategy of attracting the users in order to encourage the potential market. Facebook, MySpace, Hi 5, and some other SNSs are trying to attract as many users as possible and focusing to find the niche market. The war is brutal and similar situations are happening all over the cyberspace. The evolution of communication technology has become competitive and uncertain.

One thing for sure is that the anonymity in SNSs is not possible. According to Lessing’s saying, the norms in cyberspace may be quite different from the real world. The saying may no longer be true in today’s situation. The difference of the norms in cyberspace and the real world partly is because of the anonymity of the users. However, the interaction of people on SNSs is no longer anonymous. Most of the users know each other’s real name and some private information. Thus, most of the users are being honest with each other and they follow the real world norms in order to get along with other users well. Even though, it is still hard to regulate certain behaviors in the cyberspace. Recently, the Chinese government lists Google as inferior website because of the strong search engine could find anything, including pornography and some other inappropriate information. The Chinese government knows where, who and what Google is doing, it still can’t regulate Google or the people’s behavior.

From the above examples, I think the evolution of communication technology follows a certain path, but the behavior of the whole society and the competition is unpredictable. Thus, it is impossible to foresee the whole track of the future. However, there is some experiences and knowledge we could learn from the precedents and make the optimized decision.