Let's start with a deceptively simple question:
What is the most important invention of mankind?
Some people said the wheel, fire (which is more a discovery), harnessing of electricity for light, tools... but according to Ferren, it is something else:
Language.
Before language, humans were herd animals. We hunted for food and lived with little organized communication with others. We could not advance our thinking, we could not grow out of our minds - we could not even begin to unleash what we were capable of.
But then language gradually took shape. It went from grunts and gestures to pictures and carvings. Soon we developed an alphabet... and over the centuries we began to unify languages on a larger and larger scale. Symbols and pictograms transformed - evolved - into what we have now.
Language became a brilliant means of storytelling, and storytelling is one of the most powerful qualities of humanity. But before we get into that, we should continue to examine history.
Every time we reinvented language in some way, a fundamental shift occurred in the way humans behave. Oral storytelling was an old means of perpetuating knowledge. What came next? Reading and writing. The invention of the printing press (which was not by Gutenberg, by the way; as Ferren says, a Chinese man invented it, but Gutenberg invented the movable metal type, and the mere fact that Gutenberg was a white European male assisted recorded history's common mistake of crediting him with printing) drastically altered the way we communicate. Now, Gutenberg died penniless because the Church and other forces discouraged literacy, and the cost of a single book from a printing machine was the equivalent of $100,000 today. Moreover, nobody in his time could grasp the implications of what he had done. However, once we could print text ubiquitously, newspapers, magazines, novels, and so many other mediums of communication emerged, and humanity faced an enormous shift in daily life.
Then came the telephone. Did you know that when the telephone first came out, people, upon picking up the telephone, would not speak into it? After all, it was an alienating technology, and there's nothing in the human genome that programs our minds to speak into the phone after picking it up. In fact, this is why we originally had operators: not to regulate interaction if there's no one on the other line, but to just get the conversation started! Thus the phone business encouraged people to get into using phones this way (otherwise you'd just have two people picking up their respective telephones and then not speaking into them...). People could not grasp the significance of this change in communication. The larger idea is that the phone, like the printing press, altered our means of communication and behavior fundamentally. It enabled humans to grow even more - to be able to envision communication without being physically present.
Both the printing press and the telephone captured storytelling in a new form. We've always been storytelling; it's hardwired into our minds. Our parents tell stories, and the most engaging ones remain with us for the rest of our lives. Cavemen and people from millennia ago told stories. And enabling new means of storytelling - or capturing language in a new way, has historically always led to a drastic change in the world. This applies to one of the most fundamental aspects of life in the early 21st century: The Internet.
The Internet, like the printing press and the phone, captured storytelling in a new form like no other. And Ferren believes that the Internet is the next most important invention of man after language. Further, he asserts some of the most astounding and mind-boggling things related to this and the whole idea of language... perhaps most notably the following few:
The computer revolution has not started yet.
Reading and writing are just abstractions that will eventually be nonexistent.
Whenever we rethought language, a fundamental shift in humanity occurred.
During the times when we did reinvent language, nobody could grasp the significance of what was going on.
Reading and writing are just abstractions that will eventually be nonexistent.
Whenever we rethought language, a fundamental shift in humanity occurred.
During the times when we did reinvent language, nobody could grasp the significance of what was going on.
It's so difficult to even begin to grasp the implications of these ideas.
What does this all mean? What is going on? Ferren believes that to invent something that profoundly impacts humanity means (1) nobody in your time is going to follow the significance of what you are doing and (2) a change in how we tell stories is critical. This is a rudimentary explanation of the larger picture, but I just found what he said beyond stimulating. There's more... (at this point, I'm just trying to get down my jumbled thoughts into words):
1) There are "big idea people" and "requirements process" people. They usually do not get along. However, they must get along for any big idea to become real.
2) We must take seriously our education - and not just for ourselves, but for future generations. The ability to pass on knowledge to future generations is essential to not only humanity's advancement, but also humanity's survival.
3) To make something real, you need...
a. Vision
b. Trust
c. Simplicity
Regarding simplicity, he explained to all the engineers there that engineers tend to make things more complicated then they should be. He cited an example with space and writing. Someone thought that pens wouldn't work in outer space because pens depend on gravity for the ink to come down. So, companies poured millions into developing a pressurized pen that would work in space. They did it alright. And the pen was (and is) pretty cool; it works. But Russia just used pencils. Seriously - keep things simple...
Everything I wrote boils down to the key ideas that storytelling is critical, that already we should see that the usage of words - writing, reading - will eventually be outdated, and that future changes in the mediums for storytelling will be drastic and world-altering. We should expect some new technology to allow our minds to communicate by some other means... words can't begin to capture true expression.
Yeah. That's clearly the case in the mess of words I wrote above.
[Aside]
He mentioned one possible, simple idea of changing the medium of language that is writing. Colored words could indicate emotions... like red for anger. I thought of simple universal symbols along with writing to indicate emotions...
He also mentioned that we naturally envision things in 3D space. The idea that a picture is a thousand words is useful, as words take forever to describe things, but a 3D experience of something captures things even more...
Hmm... I seemed to have left out the impact of Steve Jobs and the iPhone. Ferren mentioned this. The iPhone essentially reinvented a medium of storytelling by placing a screen on a phone. Not a big deal when people are used to it, but imagine the shock when it first came out... and imagine the shock of the next new medium of storytelling...
