Technology Solution

Full Title or Meme

As new technology is introduced, it is often viewed as providing solutions to existing problems, but its record at that is not good.

Fixing Problems created by Technology

Good Intentions

Tim Berners-Lee is trying to tell us that his intentions for the web were honorable and somehow the catastrophe is not his fault. He claims 'I wanted the web to serve humanity." But the contemporaneous reports were that he was focused on the information sharing within the scientific community. Commercial traffic on the internet was not even encouraged until 1994, about the same time that the Netscape Navigator was released.

Let's look at several other cases of where good intentions did not bring the desired result:

Americans indulged in the fantasy that Technology could bind all peoples of the world together. In 1858 a cable laid between the US and England was to be the beginning of this Utopia. Samuel F B Morse believed the telegraph enable world peace. "One of its effects will be to bind men to his fellow men and to put an end to war. War is a shortcoming that could be overcome by way of a machine." He believed that simply laying down a telegraph cable across the continent would bind all American together in a eliminate regional differences. The civil war was in full swing within a decade.