World-changing tools.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Wikipedia, internet, video cassette recorders - Editorial

TRULY TRANSFORMATIVE technologies integrate themselves seamlessly into our daffy routines, making our lives easier and richer--and making it difficult to remember what it was like before those newfangled contraptions seemingly appeared out of the blue. What's more, such technologies live on in spirit long after they've been rendered obsolete by newer developments.

To take one example: Video cassette recorders became widely available only in the early 1980s, but they quickly revolutionized how we related not only to film and television but to other forms of art. By allowing people to watch programs and movies on their own schedules (rather than those of corporate moguls) and to share everything from cheap home movies to commercial-free copies of Hollywood offerings, VCRs helped usher in our current culture-on-demand age.

Thanks to the VCR--and a host of other technologies, ranging from cheap audio equipment to personal computers to the Internet--we now not only expect to get art, music, film, and other forms of creative expression when we want them; we're far more comfortable making our own stuff. And even as the VCR has been supplanted by the DVD player and joins the audio-cassette, the vinyl record, the Super 8 film reel, and other outmoded media in the technological dustbin, it will remain an inspiration as long as we continue to embrace do-it-yourself culture.

The same holds true for Wikipedia, the controversial online encyclopedia "that anyone can edit," which quickly became one of the 10 most popular sites on the World Wide Web after its debut in 2001. As Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in...