The Great Plateau

I had what you might call an unusual early adulthood. Whereas most young adults march off to college and garner the degree that will define their life, I dropped out of high school at the 8th grade, attended an alternative high school (read dope-smoking, although I passed at the time) for two years, then dropped out entirely. The story is long, but I helped to build two dome homes in Indiana, built and slept in a treehouse through an Indiana winter, and returned to California where I had been mostly raised, two weeks after I turned 18, with not much more than bus fare and a duffle bag.

From there I built my own life, on my own terms, which meant (oddly enough, although there are reasons if you cared to ask) a job at the local community college library in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and a life in the outdoors, which had always beckoned.

This is all background for the point I want to make. In the end, I paused before seriously attending college for about seven years. I dabbled in courses, I learned to run rivers and many other things. And that made all of the difference.

In the end, what made the difference was the timing. Had I entered college when I should have (in 1975), that would have been too early for the computer revolution. As it was, I entered college exactly with the computer revolution. I remember writing my first software program just as I was getting serious about pursuing my college education in the early 1980s, on a Commodore PET computer. My fate was sealed, and I didn’t even realize it.

Later, at Humboldt State University where I majored in Geography and minored in Computer Science, I wrote programs in FORTRAN to process rainfall data for my Geography professor. From there, I jumped on every single computer and network opportunity there was to be had.

I was an early and enthusiastic adopter (and proselytizer in the various organizations where I found work) for the Macintosh computer. I still was, when I joined OCLC seven years ago and broke the Microsoft stranglehold that still existed.

I was an operator of an early automated circulation system (CLSI) at Humboldt State. And not long after that, I co-wrote the first book about the Internet aimed at librarians.

So I am here to tell you, that after a career of being on the cutting edge, the cutting edge doesn’t seem so cutting anymore. We seem to have reached, in libraries and I would argue in society more generally, a technical plateau. We might see innovation around the edges, but there is nothing I can point to that is truly transformative like the Internet was.

This is not necessarily a problem. In fact, systemic, major change can be downright painful. Believe me, I lived it in trying to make others understand how transformative it would be when few actually wanted to hear it. But for someone like me who counted his salad days as finding and pursuing the next truly transformative technology, this feels like a desert. Well, call it a plateau.

A long straight stretch without much struggle, or altitude gain, or major benefit. It is what it is. But you will have to forgive me if I regret the days when massive change was obvious, and surprising, and massively enabling.

Photo of the Tonto Plateau, Grand Canyon National Park, by Roy Tennant, FreeLargePhotos.com