“How can we account for the radical uncertainty of change when we think about the future, but its seeming inevitability when it comes to the past?”
“I suggest that the experience of watching (and playing) sports might be of help here.”
“The first Federer-Djokovic match point is often what both tennis players and tennis analysts refer to as a “key point.“ These key points, as Djokovic points out in his post-match interview, are often the ones that “decide the winner.””
“This notion of “key points,” I want to argue in the rest of this post, might be relevant to those of us who do the history and anthropology of technology, particularly as a kind of teaching aid in helping our students understand non-deterministic theories of technological change.”
“A key point is a point (possibly among a set of points) which seems to have determined the outcome of the match, as seen by the players or the analysts (or both).”
“while an upcoming key point can be sensed by the players and the spectators, key points can be definitively identified only after the match is over”
“In other words, the identification of key points is contingent on the outcome.”
“To restate this point, the key to winning a match is to win the key points, but the points that are key to winning a match can only be determined after the match is won (or lost).”
“This is essentially a Latourian point: mobilizing “actants” is the way of building both technology and society; but it isn’t clear what needs to be mobilized until an outcome is achieved.”
“social scientists need to account for the sense of contingency and unpredictability that their actors often feel while thinking about the future”
“They also need to account for why their actors feel that certain actions are the key to changing the future”
“they (historians in particular) need to account for why the events of the past seem so inevitable, the way they seem to lead to the present so unproblematically”
“A theory of technological change that looked at “key points” as determining certain (technological/social) outcomes could be one solution to this.”
“First, the actors themselves should have some dim awareness that something important is happening and that different visions of the future are at stake.”
“Second, the outcomes of these key points should result in the victory of one group over others, thereby setting in motion a certain kind of future.”
“Third, these key points can only be determined authoritatively in retrospect once the outcome is known.”
“Those are the kinds of explanations/narratives of technological change that the key point theory would ask us to look for: highly contingent, built out of specific events, but with specific patterns that are by no means law-like.”