What is your Horseless Carriage?

Yesterday morning the president of a local university spoke at my Rotary club about the education predicament that we the country, state, county, and community find ourselves in. He was an amazing speaker, so much so, that he turned a topic of little personal interest to me (Polk county education) into a powerfully engaging and compelling speech.

At one point he posed a question to the crowd, "Does anyone know what they first called automobiles when they were created?" There were a few answers, none correct.

"Horseless carriages," he answered.

Up until that point in time the primary mode of operation for getting around town was via a horse-drawn carriage. So when a mechanical invention was created that substituted this, there were no knowns for what it was, so they described it by what it wasn't - horse-less.

The speaker then pulled an iPhone from his pocket. He said we call this a "wireless" phone because it has no wires, again referring to phones from literally decades ago that were all plugged into the wall with wires. He then went on to say that calling that invention simply a wireless phone did little to express what it really was - essentially a hand-held computer.

Now we don't even think about it - wireless phone. It makes sense to us based on what we knew previously, before, in the past, prior to the creation of, history...

When I started thinking about this I realized what a powerful, powerful paradigm this traps us in. Not so much with actual products, but with anything in life.

When something new is introduced, a new mode of thinking, a new paradigm, a new level of relationship, how often do we define it by what it is not, versus what it is?

And how much so in doing this, do we weaken it's purpose and potential because we choose to label it based on what we know and understand, rather than looking for new understanding?

The revelatory newness of a thing demands a newness of understanding. Without that understanding the thing is limited in scope by the definition that we place on it.