the breaking point

New technologies have a tendency to bull-doze the previously existing systems, video kills the radio star, so to speak. But you don't want to always watch a video, for example, while you are driving. Video has turned out to be a compelling way to re-tell a song and develop themes that are not explicit in the audio alone, and is a fantastic complement to radio - however, I don't think too many hard working people get home from work and watch music videos. They do, however, listen to the radio all the way home. New technologies overwhelm, people take them too far, but eventually they reach a breaking point after which they settle down and complement existing ones, enriching rather than just replacing.

Cars opened entire new worlds to our parents and grandparents - any mid-century movie is flush with the romance of the automobile, hard to deny. The lifestyles it has afforded are bewildering in retrospect - an entire generation moved from cramped, dirty cities into lush, spacious towns, remote except for the high-speed luxury of the automobile. But our generation has witnessed the wastelands spawned by this lifestyle, the placelessness, the degraded urban condition even while our cities are enriched by this accelerated transportation.

We sit in our cars, alone, stuck in traffic on the way to the greater togetherness cars promised.

It seems we have reached a breaking point with regard to automobile dependency, people seem to be slowly recognizing the comfort and vivacity of pedestrian life, not to mention its environmental benefits. Cars are an essential complement to urban life, bringing greater concentration and diversity to and between, but they are a means and not an end.

Mitchell Joachim's 'soft car', more an urban planning tool than automobile advancement (of course it is that, too).
new urbanism, a good impulse popularly embraced
pressure for density in my own Boston neighborhood


The same can be said of the standard computer, the time will come when we free ourselves from the relentless screen-restricted information and find other ways to interface with an increasingly networked humanity.

There is no cool site or article to link to for this, I'm just putting my thoughts down.