On the Wedge of Glory

It would make sense to take a simple concept and spend an entire chapter elaborating on it when the inferred idea of the "wedge" concept is established in the first page.

Richard Coyne establishes early on that the physical form of a wedge is being used as a symbol for innovation early in the text. The statement “it surely is an instrument of adjustment” in response to the question of what is the most pervasive device through modern development; while the continuing to point out the importance of “small scale interventions” to the success of said development.

The idea of a wedge as a small tool used to make adjustments that contribute to the overall cohesion of development through history is set up as a metaphor for the small changes made as part of the technological evolution taking place in the pursuit of ubiquitous media. The implication is that the sort of innovation needed cannot be done in leaps and bounds. This notion is correct in a couple of senses.

The first, is that there are limitations that immediately bar human capacity for large jumps in innovation of this kind. What I mean, and what Coyne painstakingly spells out for the reader, is that if humankind discovers fire on Tuesday, they won’t have coal engines on Friday. The wooden wedge metaphor being applied here, maybe the more appropriate example is if you have a stable surface on Tuesday you won’t have apartment buildings on Friday. The wedge represents the little innovations in the journey towards completing big ones. In this way, technological innovation is the same, albeit more rapid than other technological advances in our history.

The second, and less clearly addressed, is that if innovations too grand were introduced to humankind there would likely be confusion and fear that would create a backlash against said introduction. This is more implied in the chapter from Coyne when talking about calibration and tuning. What I discerned from this is the importance of considering the environmental factors of innovation. Things need to cooperate together, rather than having anyone thing advance significantly past another, otherwise the overall result is incompatibility. This idea is more sociological than physical.