Making Meaning
It’s been a busy week, but I wanted to get back on the blogging horse before I fell too far behind. Too much thinking, not enough capturing ideas in a more coherent and permanent form.
I spent one day last week at Garage Technology Ventures‘ Art of the Start. I had the presence of mind to record the whole thing on my laptop, but the quality is pretty horrible, so I’ll be making transcripts available over the next week or so (the first session transcript is available here). Guy Kawasaki had some interesting things to say, most notably his comments on the need for entrepreneurs to focus on “making meaning” in their endeavours.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “making meaning” over the past couple of months. At its core, making meaning is about improving the world – for me, this had meant trying to figure out how to take my software skills and apply them to real problems (by which I mean “problems that matter”). The question in my mind has been: is it possible to make meaningful change through software?
In my mind, I have associated “real world problems” with environmental problems – the kind of problems that require engineering residing in the world of the physical. In this definition, the path to meaningful change through software is unclear. Software is so intangible – how can a bunch of 0’s and 1’s save us from ourselves? Isn’t software mostly being dedicated to solving ‘artificial’ problems, problems originally created by someone else’s software?
But the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that software has the potential to play a much bigger role – even though the domain of its influence does not often intersect with the real, physical world – at least not directly. However, by applying the pressure in the right places, software can bring about social change that affects the real, physical world.
To illustrate how, consider the recent revolution in the world of music.
Since the advent of the compact disc, we’ve been distributing music in the most circuitous fashion: translating analog signals into digital bits, only to press those bits into plastic discs that need to be packaged and transported. Seems a bit ludicrous, transforming clean (arguably environmental) digital bits into a physical form that requires additional energy to package and transport. But at the time, the lack of bandwidth made it justifiable – but no more. Cheap computers and peer-to-peer networking software has wrought tremendous change on the industry in a short period of time by exposing the inefficiencies in the current system and routing around the brain damage of an industry in decline.
But the battle isn’t yet over – software is currently locked in an epic battle, trying to match innovation against legal attacks mounted by a music industry unwilling to redefine itself. In the wake of this battle, some truly absurd “solutions” have resulted. Consider the mass of companies offering file ripping services – requiring you to ship your CDs (more transportation and energy costs) to them, so that they can validate that you own the music you want them to rip and place on a DVD or hard drive for transfer to an iPod. That is truly messed up.
The key to winning this battle is to continue to write software that outmaneuveurs the legal attacks – whether its software to continue to destabilize anachronistic media industries by enabling or hiding content distribution, or to provide new models for empowering content creators (I’d argue that the Creative Commons license counts as software, albeit legal software). The key will be to continue to prove the futility of perpetuating the current model, and its indirect fallout in the real world (manufacturing and transportation environmental impacts, for example).
Maybe software can change the “real” world. It’s just a matter of finding the right pressure points. Oh, and figuring out how to make a buck at it while you’re at it.
Software has helped the environment in very tangible ways. I remember a few years ago many predicted the advent of the computer would mean a significant reduction in paper consumption, helping reduce demand for tree farming. But anecdotal evidence seemed to indicate that paper consumption actually increased in the late 90’s. While I observed this at my workplace for a few years, I also noticed that as file storage methods and document control systems stabilised, there was a noted reduction in paper consumption.
Behavioural transformation always lags technology as do the processes that use the technology efficiently. There have been very few technologies that have made an immediate, meaningful impact on people’s lives. Instead budding technology is used primarily by “early adopters” but is often too complicated or unreliable to become useful to the masses. The major gains in technology come not necessarily from the invention itself, but from using it wisely, seamlessly, and efficiently.