The Significance of 1948
“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information that becomes aware of itself.”
1948
What a year.
For one, my parents were born. So, it was a big year for me.
Just three short years after World War II, 1948 was the year Velcro and the LP were invented, Gandhi was assassinated, and Babe Ruth died.
But arguably, the most significant thing that happened in 1948 was something Claude Shannon did.
Yeah. Claude Shannon, a little known, introverted engineer, and mathematician living in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. While working at Bell Labs, Shannon took on a side research project and he figured out a way, mathematically, to measure information. Building on binary code, he developed an instrument of measurement called the bit. Eight bits is a byte.
And so it begins.
Just a few months earlier in December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain successfully tested and demonstrated a working transistor. This meant tubes were about to become obsolete. 1948 was the year transistors started their road to ubiquity. I could argue that 1948 was the dawn of the Information Age. The move out of industrialism was starting. Science fiction is coming to life.
75 years after the year of transistors and bits
Bits and bytes are now terabytes and petabytes — all connected to the electronic hive mind we call the Internet. I can’t help but wonder if this is the future Mr. Shannon would have prophesied about. The changes in a mere 75 years are jarring. I never know whether to be a technological optimist (the Information Age has democratized everything) or to be a technological naysaying prophet (the AI robot overlords are taking over everything and the science fiction apocalypse is what ’s coming true).
It all depends on the day, honestly.
Okay — today is the day I am convinced we are teetering on the edge of the technology dystopia; I have logged out of Twitter and other social media — places where we’re much closer to chaos.
As I reflect on two books I finished last year (The Future is Analog and Shop Class as Soul Craft) , this article, and a book I’m currently reading (The Information — it’s where I learned the importance of 1948) — I draw this conclusion.
Digital information is where we live. Embrace it.
I don’t think we all have to live on a farm and stall out with mid-twentieth century technology.
But —
We need as much of the tactile and human as possible.
● books
● pens
● bread dough
● paint brushes
● conversations
● hand tools
I wrote the first draft of this article with a handmade pen in a notebook while sitting on my back porch while the sun goes down on a Thursday.
The tactile is important. To really understand something — to really get how the world works — you actually have to do things.
“If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it. ”
So I write. With a pen.
But I will also publish the final draft of this article on the Internet with Substack and Medium.com and Squarespace. Ink strokes will turn into bit and bytes with a MacBook, and I will use an iPhone to take a digital photo and you are reading this now on a Sunday afternoon with an everyday device that would have been a science fictionalized supercomputer in 1948.
What’s the point?
I am honestly unsure. But I know this particular paradox has a lot of tension in my thinking:
Technology is a beautiful gift.
Technology has consequences.
Be mindful of both.
“The truth is that you can be productive and slow. You can balance digital demands and nourish your body with slow moments. You can value fast broadband and family dinner. Slowness is simply a different approach to the same world we all experience-one that opens up time, shifts our perspectives, and, if we were lucky, leads us to a more balanced dialogue between the body and the soul.”
You are doing better than you think.
You have more potential than you know.