Two steps forward, one step backwards

June 20, 2012 5:50 PM

I'm looking for examples that illustrate a particular concept: that a technological / social advance is often accompanied by a kind of regression to earlier practices, until people work out how to exploit the benefits of that advance. Help me nail down this rather nebulous idea!

For example, when film-making switched to sound, the films that came out immediately after regressed to static, fixed-camera affairs ("Creatively, however, the rapid transition was a difficult one, and in some ways, film briefly reverted to the conditions of its earliest days. The late '20s were full of static, stagey talkies as artists in front of and behind the camera struggled with the stringent limitations of the early sound equipment and their own uncertainty as to how to utilize the new medium." source)

I have a vague recollection of an idea that Industrial Revolution cities were considered to be a necessary evil, and much worse than village / rural living - it took many years for people to work out the genuine advantages of urbanization.

So, are these examples actually true? And are there other examples of the same phenomenon? Academic cites especially appreciated.

posted by Paragon to Technology (9 answers total)

When television was introduced, radio had been big business for 20 years. The earliest TV shows were pretty much radio shows with a camera. It took a while for them to realize that TV was something entirely new.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:01 PM on June 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

This article talks about this in regards to web design. It's 10 years old at this point but does talk about the tv/radio thing as an illustration.
posted by bleep at 6:01 PM on June 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well, the concept of Skiamorph means any new technology or advancement will first be used to mimic an older or more established form before acknowledging its own properties as desirable, plastic products first made to look like wood or stone before being Plastic and using the properties of plastic as an advantage emerged.
posted by The Whelk at 6:53 PM on June 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

And it took film a while to develop its own visual language and not just be recorded performances, which is hiw they where first sold to people, you could see any performance by any great artist from anywhere, a movie wasn't really a thing yet.
posted by The Whelk at 6:55 PM on June 20, 2012

instagram in a nutshell, wrapped up in a mobile platform, surrounded by eyeballs of desperate consumers aching to be separated from money at the punch of a button.
posted by vozworth at 7:18 PM on June 20, 2012

I was active on some multi-line BBSs back in the day, and I felt like it took eons for the internet to catch up to the adoption of the "social networking" (though we didn't call it that) aspect that we enjoyed back then. The technology had to scale up and out, and so did widespread social acceptance of what used to be ubergeeksville conceits like sitting in front of a computer to talk to people.
posted by desuetude at 9:34 PM on June 20, 2012

I would say that tablet computers do this when there aren't nearly the number of options for action as with a mouse and keyboard. An iPad doesn't have ctrl-C, right-button, or a lot of other things that have been common computer interface elements for 20 years.
posted by rhizome at 9:51 PM on June 20, 2012

Your question reminds me of Clay Shirky's concept of Cognitive Surplus.
posted by macinchik at 10:30 PM on June 20, 2012

Not as exciting as some of the other examples, but consumer digital cameras were initially very low resolution, so it was a significant step back in visual quality from film photography.
posted by beyond_pink at 8:17 AM on June 21, 2012