How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

한마디로 재밌는 책이다. 우리가 흔히 접하고 잘안다고 생각하는 Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, Light 가 현재 우리의 삶에 어떤 영향을 주었는지를 설명해주는 책이다. 다양한 분야에 대한 접근과 서술은 저자의 지적능력 혹은 노력을 보여주는거 같다. 핵심어는 'hummingbird effect',  'Ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas' 가 아닐까 싶다. 작가는 한가지의 아이디어가 아니라 여러가지 아이디어의 결합으로 새로운 것이 만들어 진다고 한다. 저자는 COLD 편에서 다음과 같이 말하고 있다. "Ice seems at first glance like a trivial advance ; a luxury item, not a necessity. Yet over the past two centuries its impact has been staggering, when you look at it from the long-zoom perspective ; from the transformed landscape of the Great Plains ; to the new lives and lifestyles brought into being via frozen embryos ; all the way to vast cities blooming in the desert."

 

- New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making ....

- The explosion of interests in self-portraiture was the direct result of yet another technological breakthrough in our ability to manipulate glass.

- The mirror doesn't "force" the Renaissance to happen ; It "allows" it to happen.

- The mirror helped invent the modern self in some real but unquantifiable way.

- We take the tools and metaphors and concepts and scientific understanding of our time, and we remix them into something new.

- Ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas ...

- When we think about breakthrough ideas, we tend to be constrained by the scale of the original invention.

- Interestingly, the most famous phone in the world - the "red phone" that provided a hotline between the White House and the Kremlin - was not a phone at all in its original incarnation. Created after the communications fiasco that almost brought us to nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the hotline was actually a Teletype that enabled quick, secure message to be sent between the powers. Voice calls were considered to be too risky, given the difficulties of real -time translation.

- The radio signals were color-blind.

- The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music ......

-Remove the microphone and amplifier from the toolboxof twentieth-century technology and you remove one of that century's defining forms of political organization, from Nuremberg (Adolf Hitler ) to "I Have a Dream."

- Sometimes cultural innovations come from using new technologies in unexpected ways.

- Like the hummingbird's wing, a change in one field triggers a seemingly unrelated change at a different order of existence.

- The musical term "tempo" comes from the Italian word for time.

- Time is now currency ; it is not passed but spent ....

- An increase in our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them.

- Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player ; He was not the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.

-Edison was also a master of what we would now call "vaporware"

- Edison didn't just invent technology ; he invented an entire system for inventing .....

- The history of BLITZLICHT reminds us that ideas always travel in networks.

- Learning from the patterns of innovation that shaped society in the past can only help us navigate the fure more successfully ...

- The time travelers are unusually adept at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise.