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The Effects Of Digital Technology

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Earlier this week, the citizens of the world gathered in front of their glowing blue screens, waiting with bated breath to hear tales of revolutionary ideas, magical new technology and innovative new gadgets. What they got instead was slightly better productivity software.

How strange then that this quite ordinary announcement still generated an enormous amount of chatter online and garnered the top spot in many news lineups. It's almost as if we are in a collective cultural hangover. Drunk off the effects of what were legitimately revolutionary products, we now expect the same again, treating each new update to the iPad and iPhone as if it were as important as the first.

This is not "Apple is doomed, can't innovate, Jobs woulda" …show more content…

We'd tune into Steve Jobs' talks because just a few short years ago, checking Yelp while walking down the street or video chatting from the bus seemed impossibly futuristic. What new things might we possibly be doing next?

Now, after a few sub-revolutionary events, we've gotten some insight into just how rare and hard that kind of sea-change is. The story of the iPhone's creation is one of many moving parts and untested designs that had to come together in a strange, serendipitious, alchemic mixture. What is clear is that, when a technological change is profound enough to affect culture, it isn't due to any one thing, but because of a swirling mass of many shifting factors coming together at the right time – and it isn't something that happens very often.

It's possible that Apple is cooking up similar revelations in wearable computing, TV or something else. But for the time being, they've become a company that is interested in preserving their massive profits and operating margins. That's fine; Apple is doing what a public corporation should by protecting value. What is perhaps less than ideal, however, is that both we and the media-at-large continue to treat each morsel of Apple news as if it is going to have similar ramifications to the launch of the iPhone, when in fact, it's just the sort of inane consumer updates best left to trade publications, rather than being headline news or kitchen-table conversation.

But if that kind

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