"But there are still Flash animations on this site!" Too true.
I'm working on it!
When Europeans first encountered the indigenous inhabitants of
Tasmania, they were surprised to discover fish was not included in
their diet. They had no fish hooks, no fishing poles and no nets,
though they did dive for some types of seafood. What was stranger
was when archaeologists discovered these people were descended from
seafarers who did use all those technologies. You can dig up an
antique fish hook on Tasmania, but not a more recent one, at least
not of indigenous manufacture. Why would people who lived on an
island give up making fish hooks, when their ancestors knew how to
do that? When I was a child growing up in New Jersey, from time to
time we would experience the 'Red Tide,' an algae bloom that made
the ocean coffee-colored. The public was cautioned not to eat
seafood, at risk of suffering neurological consquences, such as
seizure. Could perhaps something like that have happened, and they
never knew enough to lift the restriction?
We like to think of technology as marching onward, but it does
not always. When there is a civilizational collapse, like the fall
of the Minoan civilization or the downfall of Rome and the western
empire, technological capability may decline for a while. Political
movements, like the Luddites in England, or Mahatma Gandhi with his
preference for home-spun cotton cloth over machine-made, may think
they are doing something positive in blocking progress. We have
seen, in recent history, something like that with nuclear power
generation. Construction of new nuclear generating capacity is
nearly moribund in this country, in spite of a generally positive
industry safety record. And then there's Flash.
When I first discovered Adobe Flash, then Macromedia Flash, I was
blown away. What couldn't be done with such technology! New horizons
opened up. People then pondered, what wonders will the future of the
internet hold? They don't any more. The beauty of Flash was that it
performed its paces while producing small, compact files, easily
downloaded even with the dial-up internet service that was prevalent
back then. Perhaps someone thinks they are doing away with Flash
because it is obsolescent, that something better has come along in
the interval. Try translating Flash animations into mp4's, without
getting buried beneath an avalanche of gargantuan files, and see
which technology is superior: what we had, or what they want to
replace it with.
Steve Jobs, when asked when the I-phone was going to incorporate
Flash, used to like to reply, 'Never.' Evidently Flash used up a lot
of battery power, and instead of springing for more capable
batteries, Steve Jobs decided that you just don't need Flash. What
do you need it for? Would you even miss it if it were gone? And,
admittedly, Flash turned out to suffer security vulnerabilities. So
corporate America decided, on your behalf, that you just don't need
it. I mean, who needs art? If you didn't have it, you'd never notice
its absence. Steve Jobs was the master huckster of our generation.
He used to offer for sale products with fewer features than
competitors offered, at higher prices. Do you think he went broke
selling over-priced, under-featured models? He did a land office
business! You can't go broke underestimating the gullibility of the
American public. He assured people there was something 'Zen' about
products with fewer buttons. What do you need all those nasty
buttons for anyway? Like zombies they reached for their wallets. He
taught them to say, 'It's uncluttered,' rather than, 'It has limited
functionality.'
Corporate America looked at the internet, which at the outset seemed
to be at risk of becoming a visually rich, visually interesting new
medium, smirked and assured one another, 'Who needs all that? All
you need is a picture of the merchandise, and a button that says
'buy.' We're good with that.' And so the public was taught to admire
visually impoverished web sites. They were taught to say these plain
vanilla sites were 'clean,' and all the more desirable for being
boring. So goodbye to Flash. |
