For quite a while, one of my favorite examples of the unintended consequences of technological change has been the historical relationship between the invention of musical recording and live musical performance. Today that history came up in a surprising and intriguing context.<\/p>\n
At the dawn of the age of commercial recorded music, many top musicians refused to go into recording studios and cut records, because they were afraid that audiences would then no longer be interested in hearing their live performances. That’s not how things worked out. As we now know, the artists who made recordings were able to build a much larger following. Demand for their live performances consequently increased.<\/p>\n
Today I attended a talk by Bill Gates. During the Q&A, somebody asked him what he thought would be the long term effects of the growing practice of on-line education. He mentioned the historical precedent of music recording, and for me that was an “aha” moment. If music performance is any precedent, the recording and wide distribution of lectures will not kill the live lecture, but rather will result in a greater demand for live lectures by good teachers, as a result of the following they will develop among inspired learners. Bad teachers won’t fare as well.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the history of musical recording and distribution is still being written.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For quite a while, one of my favorite examples of the unintended consequences of technological change has been the historical relationship between the invention of musical recording and live musical performance. Today that history came up in a surprising and intriguing context. At the dawn of the age of commercial recorded music, many top musicians … Continue reading “The unintended consequences of technological change”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12690"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12690"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12694,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12690\/revisions\/12694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}