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- Teich, Ch. 3 -

Technological Momentum is a theory about the relationship between technology and society that purports to go beyond two other basic approaches - technological determinism and social construction. Essentially, Hughes argues that the relationship between technology and society is not only complex, but also differs based on the particular stage that a technology reaches. During the early stages of the development of any particular technology, the influence of social factors will be at its greatest. These social factors include: design choice; geographical location; the individual contributions of engineers, scientists and workers; the significance attached to a particular technology; the perceived needs of the community or state, etc. In other words, in the early stages of the development of any technological system, that system will be shaped by society.

As a system develops momentum, however, as it grows and develops, the technological system will have more influence on society - it will begin to shape society

• The investment in the new technology will encourage those who support it financially, such as governments, to maintain and reproduce it.
• Those who work in the new technology will have a vested interest in seeing it grow and prosper. They will try to incorporate more social elements into their domain.
• As a new technology develops, it also gathers around it a large bureaucracy. Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating and to mould society in their image.

Thus, while in the earlier stages of development, the social environment can play a significant role in shaping a new technology, that possibility decreases significantly over time. This means that, if you want to influence technological development, it is important to do so in the early stages.

While the social influence on technology may be real, there are difficulties associated with making that influence more broadly based. In the early stages of the development of a technological system like EBASCO, the American electrical utility, those who had the most significant influence were those electrical engineers who had the technological (hardware and software) core to contribute to the creation of a system. While these individuals had to negotiate with society in the early history of the system, they were hardly a broad based democratic group. Thus, the potential influence on the early shape of the system was limited largely to a few experts.

Another example of a technological system is the computer industry. In the early days of the computer industry, people had the room to make choices about the development of the system. A lot of different computer languages were developed and a lot of different systems emerged, reflecting very different human choices. Today, with technological momentum and the convergence of digital technologies, platforms are becoming increasingly standard and uniform. Many individuals look nostalgically back to the early days of computers, when there was more room for creativity and when computers afforded ample scope for human creativity. But we should be aware that the choices made were made for us by individuals with technical expertise.

My point here is that, even if Hughes is correct, and there is scope for influencing technology in its early stages, the choices are often made by people who have a particular technical orientation. Thus, the ability of society to influence technological development may be much less than Hughes supposes. To be sure, technology developers are human beings with social values and needs. But they represent a quite specialized sub-set of the community and one, arguably, with a vested interest in technological progress for its own sake. By the time that a particular technological system is developed, it is often too late to significantly challenge its control over society.

As you will gather from this, I myself incline towards technological determinism. I think that the social construction concept dangerously ignores the power that modern technological systems have over us. I think that the concept of technological momentum, while more sophisticated, tends to fool us into thinking that society can resist technological control by acting strategically at particular points in the development of a technological system.

But, if I am going to call myself a technological determinist, I need to take issue with some of Hughes’ descriptions of that school of thought. Technological determinism is not what Hughes’ makes it out to be. In his discussion of Jacques Ellul, for example, Hughes claims that Ellul argues that the human made environment is structured by technological systems, and goes so far as to suggest that these are “as determining in their effects as the natural environment of Charles Darwin.” Thus, human beings are merely artifacts of technological systems. That’s not what Ellul argued at all.

In the first place, Ellul did not argue that technology was a primary cause of society. He followed Max Weber in arguing that technology could be considered neutral. The real villain is Western rationalism with its emphasis on efficiency. Once technology was married with the ethic of efficiency it became something supra-human. The technology of earlier societies, for example, consisted of tools that were designed to meet particular human needs. The subservience of humans to technology only occurred when the ethic of efficiency began to dominate, as it did in the scientific management theories of people like Frederick Winslow Taylor. The ethic of Western rationalism - with a particular emphasis on scientific efficiency - has a much longer history than the history of technology. The word that Ellul preferred to use to describe the increasing control of modern technology over humanity reflects the fact that he was taking more about technological systematization than technology per se. The word he liked to use was technique. Technique doesn’t even need to suppose a particular technology.

Ellul was not the simplistic technological determinist that Hughes pictures him as being. In fact, he had something of a momentum theory of his own, but one that was much more sophisticated than Hughes. He argued that the emphasis on technique (read efficiency, specialization, expertise and supra-human values into this term) has been gathering momentum in Western society since the medieval period. In other words, technological momentum is not something that can be confined to particular technological systems but was a movement that embraced all of Western culture and that was embodied in Western rationalism. That momentum reached a particular and momental moment in the nineteenth-century when it became linked to technology and self-perpetuating.

Ellul clearly is a pessimist. He believes that once the rise of technique reached a particular point (it doesn’t matter exactly when - either in the Industrial Revolution or in the Scientific Management of the late nineteenth-century), it became irreversible. Western culture evolved to the point where men and women became the tools of technology, rather than visa versa. You might say, as Hughes does, that men and women became artifacts of technological determinism. But Ellul’s concept of technological determinism does not resemble Darwin’s theory of speciation. It is a human and a historical development. It may no longer be reversible, but that doesn’t mean that it was inevitable.

Ellul, therefore, is not a technological determinist, at least not in the sense that Hughes pictures him as being. Moreover, contrary to what Hughes argues, Ellul’s concept of technology is much richer and more complex than Hughes. Ellul is able to reconstruct an entire pattern developing in Western history, whereas Hughes simply discusses particular instances, such as the development of electrical systems. Ellul pinpoints a dangerous tendency in Western civilization, whereas Hughes lulls us into thinking that society has more influence than it does. Ellul describes the watershed that has made modern technological society truly inimical to human ways of knowing and feeling, whereas Hughes skates on the superficial surface of a more complex relationship between society and technology.

Ellul is not the only victim of Hughes tendency to make superficial generalizations. Hughes also calls Karl Marx a technological determinist. Actually, Hughes has more reason to view Marx in this way than Ellul. For Marx quite explicitly drew a link between his own theories and those of Charles Darwin. He claimed that his theory of dialectical materialism or class conflict was a scientific model of the struggle for survival in a material world.

Technology has an important place in Marx’s vision of world and, in some respects can be seen to be deterministic. But we need to untangle the role of technology and its relation to things human in Marx. First, technological developments, particularly in the form of the division of labour and machine production, are responses to a genuine human problem - the need to provide the material goods necessary to life. Technological developments in the form of the mode of production dictate the social and cultural conditions of life at particular points in history, but they never define humanity. They can’t define humanity, or turn all human beings into tools, for two primary reasons.

First, the mode of production has always been controlled by particular classes and designed to serve their interests. Thus, they have always been the tools of the oppression of other classes in society. The different interests of the different classes mean that any particular technology is the domain of social and economic conflict. Conflict implies a disagreement on the ways that technology is deployed and about the distribution of the benefits of technology. Technology, therefore, is always subservient to social and economic classes.

To be sure, Marx was firm believer in technological progress, but progress for him was measured in social and economic terms. The successive revolutions in the mode of production were made and exploited by social classes. These classes may not have represented all of humanity; they may have been oppressors; but they were not any the less human for that. If anything, Marx showed us how social classes used technology to oppress others and allowed us to illuminate the problems inherent in a class-based ideology of technological progress.

Marx’s view of technological progress was much more complicated than Hughes suggests. For as long as human beings needed to struggle to produce the material goods of life, new technologies were decisive to be sure. Any increase in the productive capacity and any increase in technological efficiency make a real contribution to human welfare in situations where economic needs are decisive. But Marx never viewed technology as self-perpetuating for its own sake. He believed that the factory system, once subsumed within a collectivist framework, would easily provide sufficient material goods for everyone (i.e. the working class). Once those once pernicious conditions of life were met, any new technologies would become the servant of humanity.

The only reason that technology was an oppressor and an alienator was because there was not enough production to go around. In the feudal system, aristocrats played a useful (but no less oppressive) role because they allowed a very limited and inelastic agricultural surplus to flow into the production of value added products. In the industrial system, factory owners could justify their profits (economically if not ethically) because they dramatically increased the productive capacity of nations and limited starvation and disease. In a communist society, the productive capacity of industry would be so developed that there would no longer be any need for class oppression.

For Marx, a communist society would reverse the role of technology in society. Whereas technology had played a dominant and oppressive role thanks to the shortage of goods, it would now be subsumed within human needs. Marx was consistent in his belief that equality in an economically developed society meant greater freedom of choice. In particular, he believed that technology would usher in a leisure society where individuals had the freedom to develop as humans. So averse was Marx to the development of a technologically determined society that he viewed freedom as the absence of the bureaucracy that accompanies a technologically efficient society. In fact, Marx appears to be naïve by modern standards because he believed that the major form of bureaucracy - the state apparatus - would wither away - in a communist society (definitely not a state!). Human beings would now determine their own future.

It doesn’t matter whether you side with Ellul’s pessimistic view or Marx’s more optimistic interpretation of technology. What is important is that you realize that Ellul and Marx cannot be dismissed as technological determinists in the way that Hughes wants to dismiss them. In many ways, the questions that they deal with are more complex and subtle than Hughes simplistic understanding of technology. Hughes’ theories are based on the study of particular industries rather than these two thinkers much more sophisticated attempt to draw connections between social and technological development. The latter may be technological determinists in some respects, but such an interpretation needs to be qualified by examining the place of technology in their social and political paradigms.

Thus, it is simplistic for Hughes’ to claim that “a technological system can be both a cause and effect; it can shape or be shaped by society.” The deeper question is how, and under what conditions, does technology shape society. Only by understanding the deeper connections will we have any ability to shape technological momentum. Hughes’ has little understanding of the deeper movement of technology and technique. As a result, his analysis of the potential for shaping technological momentum is superficial.

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/