Comment by ysavir
5 hours ago
A large part of it is that we maxed out a lot of how communication tech can impact daily life, at least in terms of communication, but economically and culturally got in the habit of looking for new and exciting improvements to daily life.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw a huge shift in communication. We went from snail mail to telegrams to radio to phones to television to internet on desktops to internet on every person wherever they are. Every 20-30 years some new tech made it easier, cheaper, and faster to get your message to an intended recipient. Each of these was a huge social shift in terms of interpersonal relationships, commerce, and diminishing cycle times, and we've grown to expect these booms and pivots.
But there isn't much of where to go past "can immediately send a message to anyone anywhere." It's effectively an endstate. We can no longer take existing communication services and innovate on them by merely offering that service using the new revolutionary tech. By tech sectors are still trying to recreate the past economic booms by pushing technologies that aren't as revolutionary or aren't as promising and hyping them up to get people thinking they're the next stage of the communication technology cycle.
> A large part of it is that we maxed out a lot of how communication tech can impact daily life, at least in terms of communication,
Perhaps for uneducated casual communications, lacking in critical analysis. The majority of what passes for "communications" are misunderstood, misstated, omit key critical aspects, and speak from an uninformed and unexamined position... the human race may "communicate" but does so very poorly, to the degree much of the human activity in our society is placeholder and good enough, while being in fact terrible and damaging.
> Every 20-30 years some new tech made it easier, cheaper, and faster to get your message to an intended recipient.
No it has regressed now. We are probably back to the level of 1950s before telephones became common.
People don't answer unknown numbers and are not listed in the telephone book.
When I was a kid in the 90s I could call almost anyone in my town by looking them up in the phone book.