One competitive force behind emerging
technologies is the the "Red Queen," based on Lewis Carol's character from Through the Looking Glass (Thornburg, 2008c). An emergent Red Queen
has an undeniable and obvious impact on the evolution of technology,
because of the fierce competition between technologies. The
consequence of a fierce battle between two Red Queen technologies;
each one racing to keep ahead of the other, results in the other
similar technologies becoming obsolete (Laureate, 2009).
When I needed to find a way to view the
movie based on a Philip K. Dick book, A Scanner Darkly, I was
able to find a vendor that offered this service to me for free, on
demand. This current competition between DVDs and video-on-demand is
an example of a Red Queen rivalry. When Video-on-demand became available to
the public, all of Blockbluster Video Outlets open as retail rental
outlets for DVD rental and purchase were put out of business, they
are all literally closed directly due to the availability of Video-on-demand technology. This shows that DVDs and Video-on-demand are
Red Queens, based on Thornburg's definition (2008c).
According to McLuhan’s tetrad
(2008b), Videos-on demand enhance current technologies because it
accelerates accessibility, improves price, and convenience to the
consumer. It obsoletes rental video stores available for rental as
physical retail outlets, retrieves the access to programming once
available from your living room when televisions were first invented,
and could be replaced in the future by a wild card technology not
currently in existence, thus reversing the
enhancing features that it originally introduced.
References
Laureate Education, Inc. (2009).
Emerging and future technology. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Thornburg, D. D. (2008b). Emerging
technologies and McLuhan's Laws of Media. Lake Barrington,
IL: Thornburg Center for Space Exploration.
Thornburg, D. (2008c). Red Queens,
butterflies, and strange attractors: Imperfect lenses into emergent
technologies. Lake Barrington, IL: Thornburg Center for Space
Exploration.
It's funny, I had such a hard time finding the DVD for the movie, Minority Report, it was all on Blu-Ray. I had a lovely conversation with the salesperson about his thoughts on Blu-Ray and video-on-demand being superior. I also believe that DVD and on demand are red queens, but only for a short time. On demand will take the lead in the race because it will be accessible from every device we own.
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