Culture Change

We heard about the death of a Steven Jobs via a news/ads monitor on a public bus in Seville. Having spent a week viewing and reflecting on what is left of one of the great cultures in the history of the Western world, our reactions to Jobs' death has left us thinking about how individuals change the world and leave a legacy.
The history of Spain is filled with people who achieved great power and wealth through successfully defeating their enemies in war, and a few of those individuals are remembered here in buildings they ordered constructed or monuments that their successors built. Hundreds of years later, however, their names are not as familiar to educated people as the names of other Spaniards, artists like Picasso or philosophers like Maimonides.

It's clear to us that you change the world by changing a culture. Culture is the interface between a people and the world in which they live. It's the expression of how a group of people experience the world, interact with it, and communicate the meanings that they find in it.

The founders of the culture we see honored in Andalusia are not honored in statues in public squares. Over two hundred years, the Al Rahman dynasty created a culture here that continues to be studied and to inspire later generations, but their successors lost the military and political battle for the country. So it's the Christian kings that we see in statues, and the Muslim call to prayer that we only hear faintly echoed in traditional Andalusian singing.

Steven Jobs changed the world's culture through technological innovations whose impact were quickly visible and understandable in the lives of a single generation. That happens so very rarely in the history of the world. Who has left a legacy of culture change is more often understood generations later. Will someone build a statue or name a building honoring Steven Jobs? Perhaps? Technological innovators are usually not as well remembered as artists or philosophers. In Akron the Inventors Hall of Fame honors those who left a technological legacy that has changed the lives of everyday people. Bell, Marconi, Edison stand out, but most of those honored there are unfamiliar names. Jobs was an inventor who also envisioned the culture change his new technology could bring about and created the corporation that could help bring that culture change into being. For that reason, he (along with Bill Gates) will have a unique place, not only in the Inventors Hall of Fame, but in the history of the world.