Yuhsuanchen’s Blog

Reflection to “The Tragedy of the Commons”

“The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.” (Hardin, 1968 ) A striking but somber opening brings us back to face the problems that we have known but escaped for hundreds of years. We all know that resources in the Universe are scarce, but the desires of human being are unlimited. Although the desires for more and for better so far continuously drive the world to move forward and the technical progress is seemingly endless to fulfill people’s wishes, the true answer might not be as such beautiful as we are used to believe in. The unlimited desire without control will lead us into a world in which nobody can benefit from the commons and furthermore “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (Hardin, 1968). The undesired consequence roots in that limited resources cannot suffice for incontinent demand.

To illustrate the concept of the commons, Hardin (1968 ) introduced the example of the pasture on which every herdsman will try to increase their cattle to maximize his profit. To maximize the revenue, every herdsman will increase their cattle one by one without restraint since he thinks the cost paid for every increment is less than he will earn from one more cattle he breeds. In such case, the price of the additional overgrazing created by one more cattle is shared by all herdsmen in the pasture. This analogy claims that each individual in the commons will pursue the maximization of his/her available resources and the negative effects for exploiting public resources will transfer to all users in the commons. This turns out that finite resources will be exhausted overly owing to the freedom of the commons and the intemperate demand from human desires. Albeit the author didn’t show how, this process will end in the tragedy of the universal ruin once the resource supply cannot fit the actual requirement.

Hardin (1968 ) then extended the concept of the commons to other public resources such as air, ocean, national parks, and even parking meters in downtown. At that time, all the public resources could be covered by the concept explicitly or implicitly. As we move into the digital era, the idea can be applied to the present digital content, media and environment as well. In our day, technologies make the production, distribution, and duplication of digital content extremely easy and cheap. The total music, video and movie markets have fallen continuously since the advent of file sharing technologies. This is the typical tragedy of the commons. People can easily infringe the copyright of digital content by duplicating from friends or downloading from the Internet without permission and hardly be punished if they are not caught. Actually it is. Similar behaviors are pervasive in today’s digital environment. Every morning, when you open your mailbox, unpleasant e-mail spam has already occupied most of your box capacity. You waste your time on receiving the meaningless spam and searching for useful mails. You also find the browser response is so slow, especially when you are busy at work, because your colleagues are surfing the Internet for shopping, entertaining and doing else. These are all due to the relative freedom in current digital environment and no appropriate and sufficient regulations placed on it. However, opponents argue that if doing so, today’s Internet may come to a dead end. This is a dilemma.

“We made a big mistake 300 years ago when we separated technology and humanism. It’s time to put the two back together.” (Michael, 1997) I believe there is no purely technological solution can deal with the social trap resulting from the conflict of resource allocation between private interest and common good. The tragedy of the commons is like an ever-repeating curse happened in past, present and future and in every corner around human life. For sustainable development of human being, maybe today’s economic slow down is the opportunity to re-investigate our social values and systems and to explore promising schemes from morality, technology, education, society, law and so on to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

References:

Hardin, G. J. (1968 ). The Tragedy of the Commons. [Washington, D.C.]: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Michael, D. (1997). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L_Dertouzos

Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave’ Joseph Bower, Clayton Christensen

Today, all enterprises are facing strong competition and tough challenges from direct or potential competitors around the world. Most intense rivalry is among head-to-head business firms, but some crucial challenges might also come from indistinct start-ups that are equipped with certain disruptive technologies. In this article, Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen investigated two essential problems of why a leading company loses its rival advantages in the mainstream market and then how to cope with this issue, while facing the challenge of disruptive technologies.

The authors think that the reason of corporations failing in keeping in the top position of their industries is due to staying close to their costumers. This contradicts the common enterprise central tenet. In order to optimize business profit and minimize market risk, the leading companies often allocate most of enterprise resources to satisfy the desires of current clients and listen carefully to customers’ sayings. In doing so, their revenue is expectable and the risk is measurable. However, this is not a good rule to deal with probable challenges from new disruptive technologies. When a new disruptive technology emerges, the leading companies will first observe and evaluate the value of this technology. The problem often comes up in their evaluating process. To follow the creeds of staying with their customers, they will try to cram the new technology to their current clients or collect opinions from the mainstream market. Nevertheless, just like the same argument mentioned in Rogers, they target the wrong market/subject to seek innovation evaluation information, because the emerging disruptive technologies seldom fit the demand of the mainstream market in their initial phase. Negative feedbacks from the wrong market lead to a bad decision in distributing enterprise resources for the disruptive technologies.

The Seagate failure in leading hard disk market gave us a typical example to support the author’s argument. The similar story also occurred in the telecommunication industry. In the nineteen century, Western Union dominated the telecommunication industry by offering reliable long-distance telegraph business in the United States. When Alexander Graham Bell introduces his invention, telephone, to the Western Union, Western Union president, William Orton, turned Bell down, because, at that time, Bell’s telephone could only send/receive signals for a few miles. This disruptive technology couldn’t meet Western Union’s business services – long-distance telecommunication and the emerging market for the telephone was so small that Western Union ignored it. The telephone technology was continuously improved and eventually, replaced the telegraph in the telecommunication industry.

Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen proposed a method to help companies when they confront with such disruptive technology. They suggested companies first identifying the disruptive technology by evaluating whether the expected trajectory of the performance improvement of the new technology will exceed the performance improvement required by their target market. If so, they suggested companies isolating an independent organization from its core business to develop the disruptive technology and business, even if this technology will finally eliminate its original core business. This method seems successful in many cases given in this literature, like Intel, CDC, etc. I believe the most difficult part and also the success key for encountering disruptive technologies is correctly identifying the new technology disruptive or not. Once companies finish their evaluating process, they can have confidence to take right actions to face challenges from new disruptive technologies.

To keep corporations staying at the top of their industries, incumbents must have abilities simultaneously maintaining their current advantages in the mainstream market and have vision to forecast the market and technology trends. Today, good managers must learn to sacrifice slight present profit for assuring its future development by correctly identifying disruptive technologies and properly allocating available resources to compete with them.

References:

Bower, J. L., & Christensen, C. M. (1995). Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW. 73 (1), 43.
Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of innovations, New York: Free Press.
Christensen C.M. SEEING WHAT’S NEXT, Harvard business school press

Introduction & Chapter 1

A storm from paradise

Technological innovation, Diffusion and suppression

Telegraph

I was surprised that the author challenged the concept in the mass communication that called we are now in the mid of “Information Resolution” or “Information Age”. At the beginning I was astonished because I have never doubted about it. After further reading, I got the ideas of the author why he asked us to turn around and look back in the past. Yes, the progress of most technological performance is exerted by certain implicit but regular powers that are classified by the author as ideation, supervening social necessities and the law of suppression. The ideation transforms scientific knowledge into physical devices called prototypes to meet certain goal initially. Subsequently, the power from the society determines the survival of these technologies and influences their development. However, the law of suppression, one negative mechanism also from the society, slows down the progress of technology to balance human life.

The development of modern cellular communication systems gives us a clear-cut example to show how ideation, supervening social necessities and the law of suppression work interactively and intricately upon this technology progress and diffusion. The emergence of wireless communication can be traced back to the mid of 19th century when James Clerk Maxwell formulated the electromagnetic theory and predicted the existence of radio waves in 1864. Two decades later, Heinrich Hertz first demonstrated the physical existence of radio waves by building an apparatus to produce and detect radio waves. After the pioneering works of Maxwell and Hertz, the Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi first developed an apparatus to transmit radio waves over long distances and filed the first patent of wireless communications in 1890s. Similar works were being done by A.S. Popoff of Russia during the same period. At that time, the first transform – ideation – from the underlying scientific electromagnetic theory to practical wireless communication systems had done. In the next 80 years, many wireless communication techniques, like broadcasting, were developed and then various derivative wireless communication systems were created and widely applied to commercial and military fields. During this period, supervening social necessities greatly impacted upon the development and diffusion of wireless communication, especially stimulated by World War II. However, the volume of these devices for sending and receiving radio waves is too large to be portable at hand. Therefore, the usage of wireless communication is limited in fixed places. Thanks to the invention of transistors, the size of wireless communication devices shrinks so largely that people can carry on the go. With the help of semiconductor technology, the market of personal mobile communication is boosted rapidly and the communication system, GSM, achieved remarkable success in the mobile industry for one decade at least. However, at this moment, the law of suppression seems brake our advance in mobile communications. We stay in the GSM systems for a long time, even though the third generation (3G) wireless system was ready in several years ago. Because of no killer applications or services for this advanced systems that provide higher transmission data rate, people seems not have strong desire to upgrade their handsets. In addition, 3G is governed by the company, Qualcomm, which filed many critical patents for this technique. Many mobile operators or cellular phone manufactures have no desire to pay such higher royalty to deploy 3G systems with such a higher cost. Both the issues stop the progress of the mobile industry. Today, we’ll see what is next in the mobile industry and keep our eyes on how the positive supervening social necessities and the negative suppression law interactively affect our life and bring us to the future

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio

Four puzzles from cyberspace

I agree that cyberspace is the second life for many people in this modern life and many people couldn’t live without the Internet. People spend hundreds of hours a month in the virtual world, even someone dies due to the long duration of staying online or playing online games without taking a break. In the cyberspace, people can anonymously put their ideas and thoughts that they would not express in the real life. For example, you can easily find someone with bad intention to spread spams or post invective articles on blogs. On the other hand, you can also have good time through the cyperspace by making friends with same hobbies or sharing information with others. I met my boyfriend 8 years ago on the BBS (Bulletin Board System) and we chatted a lot on it before we saw each other and exchanged different ideas and thoughts. Moreover, Internet helps me make my first step to know people from various backgrounds. I think this also works for other people. But nowadays, many people commit a crime or spread wrong information through the Internet. Although there are many techniques to filter bad web content, it is still difficult to block all of them.

How to make the Internet benefit human beings is a crucial issue in our modern life.