Sunday, February 22, 2015

Autos and Smartphones: Comparing Adoption Through Narrative

Chillicothe, Missouri, paved and tidy for the automobile,
was also home of the first sliced bread in 1928
Sometimes it's easy to measure the speed of technology adoption. We know, for instance, that there were 8,000 automobiles on American roads in 1900 and about 25 million in 1950.  That’s very rapid growth for a capital item in the first half of the twentieth century.   Likewise, U.S. smartphone penetration in 2005 was 20.2% and in 2014 was 50.1%, another technological blur.

Speed, penetration, and adoption are a function of numbers and can be charted. What’s harder to measure is the speed at which technology changes our behavior, or our ideas about how the world should work.   Behavior is a function of opinion and emotion, and for that we need narrative.

In 1950 journalist Clyde Brion Davis (1894-1962) wrote a colorful biography, The Age of Indiscretion, about growing up at the turn of the twentieth century in Chillicothe, Missouri.  Davis’s folksy story of the coming of the automobile provides a textured narrative for how one small Midwestern town adapted to one of the big ideas of the modern world.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Gone With the Hogshead Cask and Demijohn

Over the last week I have breezed through about twenty issues of The Outlook, a national magazine published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The Outlook had broad appeal as a general interest magazine, but paid particular attention to the social ills of the Industrial Revolution.  I had a special interest in getting a good feel for life in America in the opening years of the twentieth century, and had acquired on eBay a cluster of issues ranging in dates from 1898 to 1908. 

It only takes a few hours to get drawn into the old century.  Queen Victoria died in January 1901, the end of an era.  President McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo nine months later.  The Boer War raged in South Africa.  America struggled with what to do in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, how to deal with Hawaii, and whether to pick up work in Panama on an abandoned French canal.  The Outlook detailed the so-called "Japanese problem” and “Chinese problem,” wrestling with how America could assimilate tens of thousands of immigrants whose cultures seemed so different.  The lynching of blacks in the South and West was becoming more violent and pervasive.  Labor and “capital” were at each other’s throats from the mills of Pennsylvania to the textile factories of New England to the mines of Colorado.  There were features on skyscrapers, the nascent automobile industry, women’s education, and the ten greatest books of the nineteenth century (with the consensus #1 being Darwin’s Origin of the Species followed closely by Goethe’s Faust).