Kevin Werbach writes:
Linear progressions, such as the consistent improvement in processing power heralded by Moore’s Law, are fundamentally boring. They are like driving for hours on a straight, featureless highway: You know you’ll eventually get to where you want to go, but the trip itself becomes a blur. If instead the path forward involves stair-step transitions, through which the entire ecosystem reconfigures itself, life is far more exciting. Change is no longer measurable by one variable. It arrives in waves of interconnected developments whose relationship we only dimly discern.
That’s what’s happening today. The technologies and concepts generating buzz at industry gatherings like PC Forum, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference, and Supernova include social software, the semantic Web, Web logs, rich Internet applications, Web services, unlicensed wireless, grid computing, digital identity, broadband media. The more one looks at these developments, the more hidden connections appear. They are pieces of a larger whole, which we don’t yet have words to describe.
