Freak Show

I wonder if the survival of the fittest theory applies to technological advancement? For instance; mobile video as an application on your smart phone. I’ve had phones that could playback video (albeit grainily) for about three years now. Total amount of time I’ve spent watching videos on my phone? About 3 minutes, and even this was just me showing off.


Now in theory, taking an application from the very fit video genus and mating it with the invincible and dominant communication species, telephonicus, might sound like a wonderful new hybrid that could take on the world and win. But unless I’m missing something or unless lots of us spend vast amounts of passive time sitting on our glutei maximi, bored idle whilst presumably travelling somewhere e.g. on a train, the likely prospect of actually needing a mobile phone that can playback video is mostly non-existent. And so, unable to suitably adapt to its surrounding ecosytem - in this case it’s ecosytem just ignores it, and the sad lonely mobile phone video player eventually falls extinct. Like the classic pre-smartphone era PDA; PSION or Palm anyone?


And so I’m wondering how you might go about spotting and then scoring tech advancements for their long term survival. This writer thinks that too much of the so-called innovation material around today more resembles the nightmarish lab experiments of a crazed scientist, and most of it is destined for the pickle jar. Or my cupboard.