Ruling The Waves

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Recommended: Historical development of science and technology in modern time

Essay on Spar's Ruling the Waves

After finishing this book, I immediately thought to myself, "finally!" To explain, the book was not a very fun and entertaining read by any means. At times I found myself reading a couple pages just to get myself tired and ready for bed. However I did feel that this book was very educational and brought up some great points and ideas. Written by Debora Spar, a Harvard professor, I found myself struggling through some chapters simply because of the vocabulary and advanced ideas that she proposed. For example, when she explained the four phase model, I found some of that to be a little confusing because I initially had a hard time relating her four phases to today's technologies or industries. It wasn't until I was finished with the book was I able to put it all together and I usually have a hard time understand books like that. All in all, the book is very intelligent, but you can tell that she did not write this for the sake of entertainment. It is a great read for this class, as it is very obvious how her book applies to what we are studying.

Spar claims that with technology developing as often as it does, there are four sequential phases that typically occur. The first is the innovation phase, which is a technology's invention and initial development. The second is commercialization, or the introduction of the technology to the mainstream. The third phase is that of creative anarchy, when there are conflicts over issues of ownership, rights, standardization, and competition. Finally, the fourth phase is the rules. Theses are the where the legal structures are defined, and of course, enforced. She begins to apply these phases to several communication technologies from the printing press to the internet. It is through these four phases that I took the most from this reading because she basically is saying that we can go through history up to now and relate these phases to all the major technological innovations that we have encountered. This is extremely important because she is saying that there is a certain predictability that comes with the development of a new technology. This enables people to look at the past trends and apply successful ideas that have been proven to be successful.

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