July 29, 2006
More on Technology Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:40 AM EST Fred Schwarz wrote that “the 1970s and 1980s were an era of unusually slow technological change—or, more accurate still, that they were characterized by great advances that did not reach the saturation point until the end of the century.” John Steele Gordon concurred: “There had been a hiatus for four decades in apparent major technological change from the introduction of television (effectively late forties) to the late eighties, when the personal computer began to enter American households in large numbers.” I am not sure I agree. Fred Schwarz referenced “railroads, telegraph, telephone, electric lighting, automobiles, aviation, movies, radio, television,” but these technologies were developed over the course of more than a century. Stephenson’s steam locomotive was 1829, and however you date the invention of television, a contentious subject, in 1933 there were only a couple of hundred TV sets on the planet. Generations passed between the use of steam for cotton spinning and its use for rail travel, another generation before modern industrial chemistry (when I was in school, that was called “the second industrial revolution”), and another before mass use of electricity. I am not sure that the 1970s and 1980s were particularly impoverished as two-decade periods go. John Steele Gordon talked about technologies that affected everyday life. Were there any such big new technologies in the 1970s and 1980s? I have thought of a couple: the VCR and the spread of cable television. Between them, I think, these irretrievably changed the world I grew up in, which had three national TV networks sustained by advertising. I spent a fair amount of my 1950s and 1960s childhood knowing that a given show was broadcast at a given hour. If you wanted to be part of the national conversation, you had to be in front of a TV at certain times each week, but the VCR, very widely distributed by the end of the 1980s, meant that you could watch a program whenever you wanted, and fast forward through the commercials that financed network TV. Cable TV is an older technology, but it took off in the 1970s and 1980s. The proliferation of cable meant the segmentation of the market and the proliferation of what I once heard described as “narrow-casting.” Between them, I think those two technologies shattered a mass culture made possible by broadcast TV as it existed in the decades after World War II. In the first postwar decades, national news programs had to avoid offending any large number of people; but narrow-casting means that you can name your poison, Fox or John Stewart. Three big networks provided a remarkable number of common cultural reference points for people all over a very large country, but I wonder how long TV will continue to do that. Another key technology, developed over decades, really arrived in the 1970s and 1980s: precision guided munitions. Wire-guided antitank weapons and infrared- and radar-guided surface to air missiles were over-touted when they first came to public notice, in the October War of 1973, spawning predictions that they would end the effectiveness of tanks and fighter bombers, and that hasn’t happened yet. But PGMs include smart bombs, and those have had an enormous effect. Precision-guided munitions were used very late in the Vietnam War, and while they have been replacing unaimed bombs ever since, the process has been slow: only 10 percent of munitions dropped in the first Gulf War were PGMs. But 90 percent of the munitions used in Afghanistan were PGMs. During World War II, indeed during the Vietnam War, hundreds and sometimes thousands of bombs were necessary to destroy specific targets. American air-launched munitions now generally land within at least a few yards of their targets, and in many cases a single bomb will destroy a target. In the wake of frustrating counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq, PGMs have not impressed most Americans as technology that has transformed the strategic environment. But from the perspective of a Chinese general or admiral looking at the speed and totality of the American victory over Saddam Hussein, PGMs apparently look rather different: They are a technology that has changed the world, by vastly increasing American effectiveness in conventional warfare.
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