The history of technology is full of ideas that advanced slowly for a while and then reached a point where they suddenly moved rapidly. The history of technology being what it is, those changes are often inseparable from social changes. I’ve previously mentioned two examples of rapid implementation of new technology after years of futzing around, in both cases triggered by a catastrophic event. The huge mass of overhead wires in lower Manhattan in the late 1870 and early 1880s, the result of multiple competing telegraph and telephone companies, was buried after the blizzard of 1888 knocked a lot of the wires and poles down. The huge polluted mess of the Grand Central train yard was electrified and put underground in the early 1900s after two fatal accidents in the station approach.
The picture above show a more subtle but arguably more pervasive change, also resulting from a catastrophic event: Covid has helped kill off paper ephemera. That rack at the Atlantic Terminal of the Long Island Railroad used to hold 210 different paper schedules, and has been empty for over a year. The use of paper schedules was originally halted over fears that the paper might serve as a disease transmission medium; by the time that concern was proven to be unwarranted, the railroad had switched to new online schedules (their pre-2019 online schedules were somewhat unwieldy) that could be accessed using a smart phone and barcodes at the station. Switching to the new system relies on nearly everyone having a smart phone, which is now more or less true, and having a reason to prefer that use to paper.
LIRR schedules are only one example of this change. A lot of people who were still using cash for most small purchases in 2019, like me, have switched to a phone-based payment app. Paper newspapers and magazines, which were already in decline, have lost a lot of readership to websites and dedicated apps. Museum maps and pamphlets are being replaced by apps. And travel tickets, from airlines to the LIRR to subway systems, have seen a rapid decline relative to cards and phone apps.
I’m not saying whether this change is good or bad for the simple reason that I don’t know the answer. I do know that we seem to have passed tipping points to the new tech in a lot of areas in the past year.
