Create an Account
username: password:
 
  MemeStreams Logo

The Tweaker

search

noteworthy
Picture of noteworthy
My Blog
My Profile
My Audience
My Sources
Send Me a Message

sponsored links

noteworthy's topics
Arts
  Literature
   Fiction
   Non-Fiction
  Movies
   Documentary
   Drama
   Film Noir
   Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films
   War
  Music
  TV
   TV Documentary
Business
  Tech Industry
  Telecom Industry
  Management
Games
Health and Wellness
Home and Garden
Miscellaneous
  Humor
  MemeStreams
   Using MemeStreams
Current Events
  War on Terrorism
  Elections
  Israeli/Palestinian
Recreation
  Cars and Trucks
  Travel
   Asian Travel
Local Information
  Food
  SF Bay Area Events
Science
  History
  Math
  Nano Tech
  Physics
  Space
Society
  Economics
  Education
  Futurism
  International Relations
  History
  Politics and Law
   Civil Liberties
    Surveillance
   Intellectual Property
  Media
   Blogging
  Military
  Philosophy
Sports
Technology
  Biotechnology
  Computers
   Computer Security
    Cryptography
   Human Computer Interaction
   Knowledge Management
  Military Technology
  High Tech Developments

support us

Get MemeStreams Stuff!


 
The Tweaker
Topic: Technology 9:47 pm EST, Nov  9, 2011

Steve Jobs:

We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, "What is the purpose of a sofa?"

Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece promptly fulfills its modest purpose as a teaser for Walter Isaacson's new book, summing it up as "enthralling" even before the end of the first paragraph, thus laying the groundwork for Isaacson to join Larry Ellison and Eric Schmidt at the next New Yorker Festival for a friendly round of what-does-it-all-mean metareporting.

By the time we've arrived at Act Two, Gladwell has begun to resemble his subject. With a flourish that is simultaneously the sort of thing at which Jobs himself excelled and which he found so frustrating from others, Gladwell tweaks an old idea and presents it to you as fresh, new, more perfect:

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain's human-capital advantage -- in particular, on a group they call "tweakers." They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them -- refined and perfected them, and made them work.

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs's death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson's biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker.

In case you've forgotten your classic Stephenson, here's a refresher:

Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

Compare with Gladwell:

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution.

At this point the Gladwell Method is tried and true, but surely there is still room for a tweak or two.

The Tweaker



 
 
Powered By Industrial Memetics
RSS2.0