"The law of the suppression of radical potential" is an idea first described by Brian Winston in his book, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television. According to the law, when a communications technology is realised, its growth is suppressed through the constraining influence of already prevailing institutions and other mechanisms.
Winston shows how the law can be used as a model for describing the life cycle of many communications technologies. His approach is in particular directed against technological determinism and instead proposes that the emergence of new media and new technologies is mediated and controlled by society.
Winston has elaborated his model of technological change in particular in the books Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (1997) and Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (1998; Kindle publication in 2007 )
Famous quotes containing the words law, suppression, radical and/or potential:
“In law it is a good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit.... A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)