Is the iPhone Really That Innovative?
Probably the biggest gadget-related buzz of the past week has been Apple's announcement about the iPhone (or whatever the phone will be called after Apple and Cisco resolve their lawsuit), with its purportedly revolutionary technology that will change phones the way iPods changed portable music. "Purportedly," you say? "How can it be purportedly? There's no phone like this one out there now!" True enough, but as David Edgerton points out in this piece in The Independent, the convergence of technologies represented in the iPhone, as cool as they are, is a merely a combination of ideas that have been around for a long time, not something wildly new and different. The article, despite its rather thick middle section, is worth reading because it makes a very important point, as we get excited over yet another new round of gadgetry: whenever anyone promises us that the future of technology, uncorrupted by the past, is here now, they're lying or just plain wrong – the future of technology is as much assembled by the past as anything else in human society.
