The Voice of One Technology or Many

We briefly spoke about the black box fallacy in class this pass week, but for those of you who do not know what it is, let me explain. There is a theory that one day, sometime in the distant future, we will eventually have a small black box from which we can control everything around us. It will control television channels, our Internet, music, and maybe even backup our movies for easy storage. To put it simply, a technology that will simplify everything about our lives down to a tiny black box that can be put up and out of sight. This of course is a fallacy because we as humans like variety and will never be satisfied with one version of something. In my blog post titled “So Connected We’re Out of Control” I briefly spoke about how we, as humans, desire control, even though the control is generally just an illusion. We will always want things uniquely designed specifically to fit our needs. That is just how we are, which is why we have so many different versions of the same technology. Acer, Mac, HP, Toshiba are just a few of the different types of computer models that you can buy and depending on who you ask, you will get varied answers as to which one is truly the best. So based on this fact, we will never truly consolidate everything down into one single black box

That being said, I did come across something this past week that made me think, which at times can be very challenging. What if instead of consolidating everything down into one version of something, like the little black box, we were to create a technology standard that required most forms of technology to be recognizable by each other. Take the Internet for example. When it was first established, there were many different ways to display a web page, and, to an extent, there still is, but over time we have established an HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) standard that is, for the most part, required to work properly in most web browsers. We haven’t consolidated the different types browsers and there is still plenty of variety but generally what you can view in one browser is the same as what you can view in another. In other words we have created a way so that the different browsers can view the same content with different programs. So if we were to create a standard for all types of technologies, such as television, the Internet, music, household appliances, movies, etc. so that they all could recognize each others existence, then we could work with all of our technology but still have a variety of ways to do it? Take this video for example.

There is no particular one device or black box that controls everything; rather every device helps control each other. So what do you think? Do you think that this too is also a fallacy and will never really occur, or do you think this is the direction we are currently headed in?