Software and Innovation: Detecting Invisible High-Quality Factors

Introduction

Human face-to-face communication remains a key element in the evolution of information technology. Technologies that for a long time have tried to displace almost all the human knowledge that has been accumulating for centuries, on the Internet (Crocker, 2019; Chang, 2018; Cipolla-Ficarra, 2017). The purpose is to structure a kind of great collective memory, as a legacy for future generations. In this legacy are the uses and customs, for example, transmitted through oral communication, in the different cultures of the world. It is the great analog and digital baggage of knowledge that testifies to the wealth of the human being when it comes to solving the problems of everyday life. This communication practice still persists, in numerous communities, far from the great cities of the planet.

With the daily technological advance, this oral knowledge has been digitized and stored on various magnetic supports, such as: magnetic tape, hard disk, floppy disk, compact disk, DVD, USB flash drive, etc. These are data that is to be accessed online, through software applications. However, these interactive systems have also evolved over time from hypertexts, multimedia, etc. until reaching mixed reality. However, with the breakthroughs in information technologies, many creative and innovative contents have become obsolete, due to the change in the operating system, although the associated hardware and the rest of the applications on personal computers, tablet PCs, servers, etc., have always functioned correctly (Appuswamy, 2019; Egyed, et al., 2018; Allu, 2017).

Technologically, today, there is no single device to read or interact with them. Therefore, in the era of the expansion of communicability, there are retrograde technological factors, derived from human decisions, which thus belong to the set of human factors in software engineering. In this case, these factors act as real barriers or filters, since they prevent the population's access to a part of the universal historical knowledge, whose origin is in the diffusion of computer science in the homes of millions of users. However, there are masterful exceptions in the field of human communication.

Without resorting to the latest technologies, messages can be emitted and received, between humans and across the distance, for instance by whistling, on one of the islands of the Canary archipelago: La Gomera. “Silbo gomero” –gomero whistling, declared an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, is a whistled language practiced since the time of the local indigenous people (Guanches,in Spanish) or First Nations, to communicate from several kilometers away (Classe, 1957; Meyer, 2008).

In our days, that can be an example of ancestral creativity or linguistic innovation. In addition, it continues to surprise many, if it is analyzed from a sociological point of view, since it allows creating personal interrelationships at a distance in a rural context, and without using personal computers, tablet PCs, smartphones, etc., derived from international projects unfinished or unsuccessful, such as the One Laptop per Child –OLPC (Kramer, Dedrick & Sharma, 2009).

Although we are dealing with two language systems, one natural (whistling) and the other artificial (computing), both are governed by a set of rules. These rules must be known and respected by each component (human or technological), in the communication process. A greater mutual and shared knowledge of the science is related to each other, with a high level of communicative quality. In other words, communicability is included (Cipolla-Ficarra, 2017). In addition, innovation in an artificial system occurs when the initial product evolves towards something different and new, and this innovation occurs on the basis of small evolutions or transformations, and not of a great revolution. Frequently, hardware revolutions make software evolutions drag behind.