opencopy.org

- Robins and Webster, Ch. 4 -

Introduction

In this lecture, I want to stress the dialogic nature of technological development in society or, to put it another way, the social imbeddedness of technology. You’ve probably noticed how difficult it is for writers on the history of technology to avoid reifying their subject. Technological and scientific discovery become the engine that societies follow, or do not follow, at their peril. That’s why it’s so important to assert that all technology is a human creation and that technological development implies choice. What works for one society or culture, may not work for another. What works for one class in society may not suit another.

The issue of technological progress was engaged in the nineteenth century, when people believed that the railway was the symbol of progress. It was reasserted during the twentieth century when nuclear energy was going to transform the world. But never has technology been placed in such a firm and inescapable driver’s seat than in the present, where we have placed Information Technology (IT) or Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at the controls.

Inevitability and Utopia

The individual writer who is most often referred to in connection with the new society is Marshall MacLuhan. As you probably know, his most famous statement was “the medium is the message.” In other words, new communication techniques were going to be the dominant features in our life. Thus, MacLuhan and his followers were technological inevitabilists. Anyone who critiqued the new technology and its effects was compared to someone who would have condemned books to be burned after Guttenberg started to mass-produce them. The other characteristic of MacLuhan and his followers is that, in addition to suggesting that there was no escape from new technologies, that the general tendency of these technologies was progressive. MacLuhan, for instance, suggested that new communication technologies would turn the world into a “global village.”

The global network was not only inevitable but it had the characteristics that are usually attached to utopian thinking. This combination among propagandists for technology has achieved the status of an ideology. It is difficult to escape it in the media, in everyday conversation, and even at university. In fact, some of the most uncritical proponents of technology teach at York University. Their thinking is characterized by the following:

1. A deep belief that a technological revolution is taking place and that those nations and individuals who don’t keep up with technological progress will suffer the fate of the dinosaurs.
2. That those who will have the most power in the brave new world will be those knowledge workers or symbolic analysts that can adapt to the proliferation of knowledge. Those employers who do not systematically recognize and promote knowledge workers will become the dinosaurs of capitalism.
3. That the new society dominated by knowledge workers will allow much greater flexibility, individual choice and freedom - but only for those who embrace the new technology.

The style of discussion and debate that the proponents of IT and ITC adopt is not without certain contradictions. On the one hand, they criticize old systems of learning and producing as doomed to extinction; but they often take on the posture of defenders of an imperiled technological society from the forces of apathy and tradition. Second, while they argue that future belongs to those who can play creatively and purposefully with the information provided by new technologies; they demonstrate an unhealthy preoccupation with the mechanics and minutiae of technology that constantly results in wasteful and mind numbing learning. Finally, they condemn those who would presume to critique the use of IT or ICT as anachronistic Luddites, but they invoke concepts like the global village or the electronic cottage or the Internet community in ways that sound very much like a return to preindustrial values.

The Social Embeddedness of Technology

Despite their praise of symbolic analysts, most commentators on IT or ICT evidence the analytical skills of chipmunk. One reason for their lack of depth is their noticeable lack of imagination, perhaps the result of their childlike and essentially passive acceptance of technological utopias and virtual realities. Another, and more serious problem, is their lack of history. Technophones seem to forget that similar claims were made by the proponents of every new technology. When the leaders of India invested in nuclear power during the 1950s and 1960s, leaving their nation further behind than ahead, they also invoked the inevitability of industrial progress. An earlier parallel was the praise of the modern factory as the ideal working environment and blending of man and machine by Andrew Ure in The Philosophy of Manufactures.

What really happens in terms of technological progress is that human beings make choices, some of them are successful and some of them are not. Technology has never fulfilled the dreams of its promoters, but continual promotion has allowed technology to become an evolutionary force. Of all the writers on technology, only one has ever made a good intellectual case for its character of inevitability, and he was a writer who believed that the prognosis for technology was anything but optimistic. Max Weber argued that technological progress was merely a continuation of bureaucratic rationalization in the west that would inevitably put people into its own self-referential iron cage.

But the history of industrialization suggests that there is nothing inevitable or even predictable about technological choices. The development of the factory system occurred in a capitalistic marketplace that claimed to correspond to the laws of our economic nature. But that did not stop governments and communities from quickly creating all kinds of regulations, laws and background institutions to keep factories and machine production from destroying society. Technological dialogue since the Industrial Revolution suggests that many societies adopt technologies in their own way and adapt technology to their culture.

On the surface, it would appear that no society embraced new technologies more whole-heartedly than the Japanese. But even a superficial understanding of Japan’s most technological corporations shows the dominating role played by traditional concepts of loyalty and inter-group consensus. A more problematic historical example is the way that nuclear technology has been adopted by a number of countries to serve a military function. Even in present day America, technological development proceeds hand in hand with militaristic ideals.

What the reification of technology does is to obscure the social embeddedness of technology. In particular, it obscures the power of the very small economic elite who control the mode of technological production in Western society. The debate on new technology has difficulty dealing with the ways that technological development accelerates the differences between the have and have not nations, as well as the gravitation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands in the advanced companies. Moreover, the so-called silicon revolution conveniently created a few new members of the elite, thereby obscuring the predominant tendency towards the consolidation of wealth.

In terms of capitalist ideology, the new silicon society performed a similar function to the self-made men of the Industrial Revolution. In both cases, the numbers of the newly arrived were few. In both cases, continued hegemony was achieved, not through creative innovation, but the deployment of capital and the creation of cartels. Every technological revolution creates a small space for social mobility, but what is interesting is just how small that space is and just how quickly it closes.

The peons to technology - and the simplistic equation between creativity and success in the silicon city - obscures the continuing importance of class and colonialism. The glorification of individuals like Bill Gates, in spite of widespread proof of mimicking the creativity of earlier pioneers and establishing an unfair monopoly, can only be attributed to the need that people have to believe in the power of technology to change the world and society for the better. There may be elements in technology that allow for social improvement, but that improvement is neither autonomous nor inevitable.

The Silicon Revolution Reconsidered

The Industrial Revolution was a true revolution, not in the sense that it broke completely with the technological developments of the past. Clearly, it didn’t as most of the current research demonstrates. But it was a social revolution in that capitalists required people to completely change their habits and to conform to the new division of labour that blurred the distinction between man and machine.

The Technological Revolution is much more of an evolution. Despite the increased rapidity of change, we are moving along a more well defined social trajectory. This trajectory can be divided into the following elements:

1. Information Society: We have been involved in an information society ever since educational institutions were constructed that ensured universal or near universal literacy in the West.
2. Increasing Professionalism: The so-called intellectual workers of the future may need to be highly-self reflective, even more so than the past, but even the most optimistic estimates of this group put it no higher than 30% of the population. If so, this is just a continuation of the ever-increasing specialization of a sector of all advanced societies.
3. Increased World of Choice: The choice only applies to those people who are clever. Generally, these are also the people with the most education. The fact that they are not always one and the same merely shows that freedoms are decided, not by those who think outside of the box, but by those who control the direction of capitalism.
4. Increased Quality and Variety of Consumer Goods: If ever there was a tendency that corresponded to the need on the part of capitalism to increase consumption, it is the emphasis on new and higher quality products. This is a capitalist tendency, not an isolated technological development.
5. An Emphasis on Theory and Flexibility Rather than Specialization: Now this is an interesting development, although it could be argued that this concept is nothing new but was included in the thinking of E.W. Taylor and the advocates of scientific management and specialization from the beginning. To the extent that the emphasis on theory is a new development, however, it hardly supports techno-enthusiasm. The new theorists are inclined to view everything as connected and not to differentiate technology to a distinct MacLuhanesque sphere. An example of the new theoreticians would be those environmentalists who talk about sustainability and the interdependence of ecosystems.

Techno-Boosterism

Techno-enthusiasm may have captured the imagination of the media and a small group of technophones. Arguably, these attitudes have not spread to the general population who, increasingly, are not rushing out to purchase the latest techno gadget and whose spending is pouring cold water on those who view the computer as an agent of revolution. Fortunately, the mass of the people is not so easily deluded by the claims of the technology enthusiasts, whose capacity for jumping on and off the technological bandwagon merits serious psychological investigation.

The biggest problem among those who do not buy into the technological revolution is their apathy. They fall into the trap of technological inevitability to the extent that they are incapable of seeing other alternative modes of discourse. In Times of the Technoculture, Robins and Webster are concerned, not only to attack the logic of IT and ITC, but also to show that our technological society is “malleable and the outcome of human decisions.” For them, it is the “market system” that should be the focus of evaluation and not simply technology.

Robins and Webster suggest that it is a mistake to think that we live in a post-capitalist society that will be run by information experts of symbolic analysts. For them, the corporation of the past looks a lot like the corporation of the future. The global village is dominated by a small group of capitalists from the advanced capitalist nations. The potential for choice is limited to a small group, and it is far from inalienable. It only survives to the extent that it meets the perceived needs of organized capital.

There might be many other kinds of sociological critiques of techno-enthusiasm that the left wing orientation of Robins and Webster. But their essential Marxist critique at least demonstrates that there are alternatives to techno delusion.

A Brief Analysis of the ‘Information Revolution’

Many academics and others regard the development of IT and ICT as an Information Revolution that will transform our lives. Many others believe that this revolution will be inherently progressive and democratic. Such interpretations relate to a belief that knowledge and its collection are neutral activities.

Elements of this revolutionary interpretation suggest a complete rupture with the past, as exemplified by certain shifts from:

1. centralization to decentralization,
2. market averaging to market segmenting,
3. concentration of information to dispersal of information,
4. rigid organization towards greater fluidity and flexibility based on state-of-the art information.

These developments relating to the mobilization of information and communication resources have a longer history, however, that cannot be understood if one focuses on what is immediate or apparently revolutionary.

In Times of the Technoculture, Robins and Webster want to critically examine these assumptions historically. By looking at knowledge access, gathering and dissemination prior to the spread of computers and digital information, they claim to detect a longer term pattern of information gathering that relates to two distinct purposes that are anything but neutral:

1. the efficient management of organizations and social planning,
2. the more effective surveillance and control of employees, groups, national populations and, eventually, the global community.

If we believe that knowledge is individually beneficial and socially progressive, and that IT/ICT is qualitatively different than anything that has come before, we will obscure the dark side of the so-called information revolution. An analysis of the dark side suggests that information is being gathered and progresses by certain groups in order to more efficiently control others. Moreover, a characteristic of this information gathering and dissemination is to deny the possibility of public debate over issues.

Robins and Webster would certainly agree that some features of the Information Revolution are unique. The technological character, pace and range of information gathering eclipse anything that went on in the past. But the pattern was established during the 1870s and that pattern can be seen in everything that has happened to knowledge gathering ever since.

Scientific Management

The starting point for the new information society was established in the Scientific Management movement that was spearheaded by Frederick Winslow Taylor and that created a new and more effective kind of managerial capitalism. By the 1870s, those who were in control of American business were growing increasingly frustrated with classical market ideology. The premise of the capitalist marketplace was the marriage of supply and demand in a competitive marketplace. Prior to this time, capital investment and social progress were thought to be effected by Adam Smith’s hidden hand.

Taylor and others knew better. They proposed the idea of the efficiently managed corporation and industrial systems that were controlled, not by anything as unpredictable as competition, but by vertical integration of large enterprises. Vertical integration meant two things: 1) a hierarchical chain of command run by managers who were the brains of the corporation, and 2) complete control over the production process from the supply of raw materials, the velocity of production, and the final distribution of the goods produced. Vertical integration meant that the managers - those with specialized knowledge - basically dictated what employees were to do. The tasks were routinized and made more efficient through time-and-motion studies.

The interesting thing about this knowledge transformation is that it involved little in the way of technology. Technology was still confined to the machinery of the plant (the new name, since the old factories were now considered to be inefficient). The precise routines of the machinery subordinated the human workers while the managers achieved greater control as the planners of the operation. The planning function was based on their superior brain power and their specialized knowledge. The goal of this separation of intellect and labour was greater production through efficiency. Efficiency itself came to be viewed as the apotheosis of rationalism.

The fascinating thing about Taylorism or Scientific Management was its open-endedness. Scientific Management was too big an idea to be confined to business. It soon developed into a social philosophy. Governments began to see the need for greater brain power and the need to have trained experts or civil servants who could engage in state planning. Most of the participants in the Scientific Management movement were originally engineers; hence the term social engineers (later technocrats) that came to be applied to those who felt that society would function more effectively if it was run by those with superior knowledge who also appreciated the requirement for efficiency. Society itself now was seen as a complex machine, far too complex to be left in the hands of amateurs or citizens

The Statistical Revolution

Originally, Scientific Management focused on the concepts of efficient systems or machines. The planning function of management, however, demanded a much broader statistical framework. Vertically integrated organizations soon found that, while they could increase production significantly by eliminating waste, tightening operations, and developing economies of scale, they still had a problem figuring out what goods would sell and distributing them to customers.

Usually overshadowed by F.W. Taylor, another management guru by the name of Harrington Emerson (1853-1931) also focused on the specialized planning function of managers. But Emerson and his followers also argued that expert planning by specialists required better statistics on which to base decisions. Thus, by the early twentieth century, a statistical revolution was in full swing, and the information was sought after by both corporations and governments to assist them in planning. Terms like business biometrics entered the English language as the very first examples of a revolutionary approach to gathering and applying information.

With the application of statistical theory and method to management, we can truly say that an information revolution was already in full swing by 1911. That revolution intensified between and following the two world wars as capitalism entered a new phase. That phase was the development of a consumer society, which depended heavily on the “collection, aggregation, and dissemination of information.” In order to create a consumer marketplace, the quantitative study and analysis of human behaviour is imperative. The information is used in two ways: 1) to detect the existing needs and patterns of consumption of individuals and groups; 2) to develop marketing and advertising that will appeal to these individuals and groups and thereby allow businesses to sell them new products. A range of new techniques (not yet technologies) were used to obtain this information. These included market research, census data, opinion polls, social science and psychological techniques, and self-conscious propaganda.

Without an already existing information society, a consumer society would have been inconceivable. Therefore, a knowledge society existed long before IT and ITC. Moreover, the characteristics of the earlier information society included the surveillance and control of human beings for economic purposes. The entire point of advertising and marketing in general is to instill new needs, to alter existing values and to train people to act as consumers. In many respects, the information revolution was already well established prior to the introduction of computers, satellites, telecommunications and the so-called global village.

A Critical Approach to the New Communications Technologies

It is certainly true that the new information and communications technologies greatly increase the reach and power of those who control them. It is often presumed that these technologies are neutral and can be used for any variety of purposes, including ones that are democratic. After all, the World Wide Web, once it divorced itself from its militaristic origins, appeared to function as a highly egalitarian vehicle for sharing information.

More recent developments should make us reconsider such naïve assessments. Those who are “promoting and annexing cable systems, communications satellites, telecommunications links, computer resources” etc. are those who want to manipulate us in order to make profits. All of these information and communications technologies are converging in ways that assist the greater segmentation and control of the economic marketplace. Computer cookies can easily log you and your family’s personal preferences. Computer scanners can tell companies what products you like. Credit and bank cards provide access to detailed financial histories.

We should not think that these technologies are only the tools of those looking to manipulate us for profit. These same tools, ranging from statistics to individual profiles, have long been in the hands of governments. Consider, for example, public opinion polls, which are scientifically accurate to within 2%. Arguably, these statistical tools prevent democratic debate on important topics and allow governments greater control for managing the public perception.

The Shrinking of the Public Sphere

Some political scientists have argued that modern life is so complex, and politics is so managed by experts, that the possibility of a public debate or forum no longer exists. The transformation is one in which the public sphere has been “superseded, managed and manipulated by large organizations which arrange things among themselves on the basis of technical information and their relative power positions.” In other words, technicians and bureaucrats now run our lives.

The change from capitalism to corporatism involves an entirely new definition of reason. Early capitalism, and early democracy, were founded on the notion that every individual is capable of making rational choices and should be given the freedom to make those choices independently. The appeal is to the reason of the individual and the individual person. In a corporate and bureaucratic society, the individual’s reason and interests need to be managed for the greater interest of society. It is society that must be rationally organized. The guiding principle for social and corporate rationality is efficiency.

Efficiency requires technique, but it does not require technology. The modern IT and ICT technologies, however, speed up and broaden the progress towards greater efficiency. The rationalistic and technocratic principle always runs into the problem of opposition from human elements. While it is relatively easy to control the workplace, it has been much more difficult to penetrate other aspects of individual and group life that have been notoriously independent.

The new communications technologies and strategies allow much deeper penetrations of individuals and groups at all levels. They are a much more sophisticated nervous system for corporations and governments. They operate on a global scale and they can transcend many of the historical barriers of time and space. What the historical pattern suggests is that these new technologies will not develop new communities or more knowledgeable democracies. Instead, they will provide those who have controlled us with greater information and the ability to control us more.

At the end of the day, the rationalist principle inherent in Scientific Management and its successors, points to more not less social engineering. If Robins and Webster are correct, then the impulse towards efficiency may eventually dominate human life even in the absence of “money or weapons”. At least this is what likely will happen if we remain blind to the “histories of reason, knowledge and technology.”

Some Notes on Cybernetic Imagination

1. Technology as the mobilization of society
   • Factory and economic discipline
   • F.W. Taylor and Ford - logic of the machine
   • Spread to external world - consumerism
   • State bureaucracy reinforces capitalist bureaucracy
   • Time and tasks spread to external world
   • Privatization and marginalization of everyday life
2. Net result of these developments
   • Self-mobilization for capitalist goals
   • The decline of public life
   • The end of ‘counter mobilizations’
3. The Information Society and the World Brain
   • Increase in variety for 20% of population - ‘symbolic analysts’
   • Deskilling of positions for everyone else
   • Ability to monitor employee behaviour, even at home
4. Running Together of Work and Leisure in Oppressive way
   • Creation of ever more ‘flexible’ workers, who even adjust to contracts
   • Employment invades private sphere
   • Free time subordinated and interfered with
   • Time and tasks of consumer and worker divided into pellets - nicks of time
5. Increasing Control From the Centre
   • Permanent power grid
   • Statistical information on individuals
   • Knowledge of preferences, friends, choices - i.e. music clubs
   • State/police/corporate knowledge
   • Information as commodity - most essential information out of hands of normal users
   • Convergence of technologies allows greater controls
6. The New Panopticon
   • No longer physical but electronic
   • Idea is to be able to see anyone at any time
   • Because people can be seen, they act as though they are always being seen
   • True privacy is thing of the past

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The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/