Despite the frequency of posts slowing down a bit here, there’s still a lot of thinking and positining towrards this idea that mobile devices, services, and expereinces facilitate part of the lens by which we should look at faith in these times. In a most recent reading about steamboats, landlines, and cars, the challenge was not to think about it in terms of creating something new, but what it looks like when technologies and practices decay. Here’s a snippet:

…Some niches eventually grow to replace the prevailing regime, as cars themselves once did. But that process is equally dependent on so much more than technological invention. Look at how the cell phone has evolved to replace the landline. Our need for cell phones didn’t arise in a vacuum. Work practices changed. Commuting times got longer, creating the need for communication inside cars. Batteries got smaller. Cell phone towers proliferated.

These are the unnoticed events that happen in the slow course of technological transition. We didn’t even recognize that the car was a fundamentally new thing until around World War I, Cohen says. Until then, many people viewed the car as just a carriage without a horse.

“The replacement of the car is probably out there,” Cohen adds. “We just don’t fully recognize it yet.”

In fact, he predicts, it will probably come from China, which would make for an ironic comeuppance by history. The car was largely developed in America to fit the American landscape, with our wide-open spaces and brand-new communities. And then the car was awkwardly grafted onto other places, like dense, old European cities and developing countries. If the car’s replacement comes out of China, it will be designed to fit the particular needs and conditions of China, and then it will spread from there. The result probably won’t work as well in the U.S., Cohen says, in the same way that the car never worked as well in Florence as it did in Detroit…

What Steamships and Landlines Can Tell Us About the Decline of the Private Car at Atlantic Cities

In thinking about the implications of this tech, are we also paying attention to what decays in order for mobile to rise? And then futher, when mobile decays, what will arise from there?