opencopy.org

- Teich, Ch. 11-12 -

Introduction

The articles “Technological Politics As If Democracy Really Mattered” and “Black Futurists in the Information Age”, by Richard Sclove and Timothy Jenkins respectively, don’t deal with technology as an abstraction. Rather, they try to show what needs to be done if technology is to empower people. Both authors clearly believe that technology can improve our lives if it is used wisely. Both share a conviction that access to, and ownership of technology, is critical to the well being of social groups, in particular minorities. There is a fundamental difference between the two authors, however, that may not be apparent on first reading. Jenkins is a technocrat who believes that people need to adjust to technological change in order to be empowered. Sclove argues that human empowerment comes when technology is adjusted to human needs. Thus, despite the fact that Jenkins is the champion of black equality and black power his analysis is much more right wing than Sclove’s.

Let’s start with the basic agreement. Both Sclove and Jenkins believe that technology has the power to contribute to human progress. Jenkins is particularly optimistic about the power of the new information technologies to improve the quality of life. He suggests:

On-line computer networks can offer a new town hall. Desktop publishing promises a new public forum. Civic teleconferencing can become a new vehicle for group dialogue. Distance learning will allow a classroom to be worldwide. No longer must music, art, and theatre suffer an unnatural fence. The libraries and museums of the world can be available to the most remote corners of the earth for the first time in history. Diagnostic health care can now be distributed without regard to distance between patients and national hospital specialists. Soon, with everyone able to be his or her own publisher, the means for truth telling as an everyday Internet exchange, rather than the occasional moment, can be at hand.

Sclove, obviously, is more impressed by the power of these new technologies to isolate people from one another. The technologies that he discusses are more traditional, taking the form of architecture, manufacturing, and municipal systems. When he mentions modern digital technologies, such as the Discman/walkman it is to question the assumption of progress. But he is by no means anti-technology, and merely seeks a broader “range of alternative technologies from which to choose.”

The problem for both of these authors is that technological progress is not inevitably a social benefit. It can, and often has, increased the separation between people and reinforce class/economic distinctions. In a sense, both Sclove and Jenkins want to give technology back to the people. In the case of Sclove, the people are local communities; in the case of Jenkins, the people are the black communities of America. But Sclove’s analysis of capitalism and technology is much bleaker than that of Jenkins. For him, our present technological world is inhumane and characterized by an “immense void”. For Jenkins, the major problem is the inability of minorities and their leaders to embrace the possibilities of the Information Age.

Whether or not you agree with their assessment of technology or share these author’s very different perspectives, you should be interested by their assessment of the potential problems that new technology poses, particularly in terms of the overall quality of life of a community.

Sclove offers several examples of the unexpected social consequences and the complex effects of changes. Here’s another provided by authors Willmott and Young from Family and Kinship in East London. During the nineteenth-century, a low-income slum developed in East London England as a result of workers coming into the city looking for work. After the Second World War, a well-intentioned government moved the inhabitants of the East London Slum into a new subsidized housing suburb outside of London. By so doing, they broke up a close, vibrant community and decreased the quality of life for a sizable percentage of the community. In some ways, the old slum was a more livable place because people were not so isolated from one another, shared the supervision of children, and had shops and other amenities close by. In contrast, the suburb divided the community into nuclear families and decreased the variety and richness of the contacts between people.

When looking at the consequences of technological change in all their complexity, it is particularly important to see how they might effect the poorer or weaker segments of any community. The introduction of any new technology will have different positive and negative effects for different members of the population. There is a very real danger that potentially empowering technologies, like the personal computer and the Internet, will increase the disparity between rich and poor within and between nations. Jenkins, for example, is concerned that the Information Superhighway will bypass the majority among the black population of North America unless access ramps are provided and maintained for minorities.

These two authors highlight potential problems that have, or can, result from the introduction of new technologies. The fact that they have very different points of view allows you compare and contrast their analyses. As you will gather, I tend to be critical of Jenkins’ optimistic assessment of the power of technology to improve life and his blatantly capitalistic agenda. I myself am much closer to Sclove in believing that new technologies need to be introduced carefully and with respect for human needs. But you should feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Sclove on Technological Politics

As mentioned above, Sclove is interested in technology in the broadest possible sense and does not really say all that much about the new information and communication technologies (ICT). What he does do is provide a set of criteria for evaluating any new technologies and some interesting examples/models/prototypes on how technology can be humanized. At the heart of Sclove’s analysis is the belief that the key goal of any society is to involve its members/citizens as fully as possible in politics and community life. Such involvement was common in late eighteenth-century America, but it has decreased significantly in the intervening century and a half because of technological progress.

The chief problem with new and increasingly sophisticated technologies is that they contribute to centralization and authoritarianism. Their introduction usually requires economies of scale, standardization, and bureaucratization (about which Sclove surprisingly says relatively little), all of which erodes the former role of the local community. The classic example is water and sewage management. With the urbanization of the nineteenth-century, it was necessary to provide clean water to communities and dispose of the waste/sewage that could cause typhoid and other diseases. These were problems that were most efficiently and cost-effectively dealt with on a municipal and regional scale rather than on a local scale. The development of urban management systems took a lot of economic decision making out of the hand of local councils and put it into the hands of more centralized authorities. As urban societies developed, more and more of the decision-making was centralized and local governments and local governments became smaller and smaller players. The technological imperatives of municipal government in effect “wound up subverting the autonomy and the tradition of local self-governance.”

The stages following early industrialization and urbanization had an even more disastrous effect upon the traditional community. As factories were transformed into modern plants and production increasingly took the form of an assembly line, factories could take on a much larger scale and could be located anywhere. One of the first products of the new assembly line, the automobile, allowed individuals to move to suburbs, thereby gutting the vibrancy of the urban community or the town hall, and separating work from life. The former avenues for worker and community involvement were decreased, especially with the cost-effective architecture of suburbs, which allowed nuclear families to inhabit separate box-like structures that were easily accessible to stores and workplace only with the use of the car.

Clearly, reversing the anti-democratic tendencies of a century and a half of technological development is a difficult task. But experiments and attempts have been done. The Volvo factory in Sweden shows that the linear assembly line is not the only, and certainly not the most human, form of production. Co-operative housing projects have restored seemingly lost areas of public space and brought people together in new and creative ways. The common house in a Co-op in some ways mirrors the old village town hall where people engaged in joint decision making about things that affected their daily lives. New models of town planning have transformed some potentially alienating suburbs into vibrant communities where businesses, daycares, houses, parks and recreational facilities are built more closely together to form places where people can walk to many of their destinations and where genuine communities have a chance to develop. Some national governments have allowed task forces - like the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry spearheaded by Tomas Berger - that have involved local populations in the decisions that affect them. Some formerly disenfranchised communities - such as the disabled - have effectively mobilized to bring about major changes in the architectural design of facilities to make them more accessible.

Humanizing technology for and by the people is no easy task. It requires consultation and involvement at all stages in the introduction of technology, especially the design stage. That’s why Sclove uses the term RD&D instead of R&D. The development of any truly technology involves more than Research and Development; it must be founded on Research Design and Development. For it is primarily in the design stage that that the mediation between technology and the local community occurs and that a new technology is democratized. Unfortunately, the local community, if it is consulted at all, is usually consulted after the technology has already been designed and is a fait d’accompli.

In addition to focusing attention on the participation of the community at the design stage, Sclove also draws our attention to the need to take into account the complex relationships between different kinds of technology and the society where they are introduced. Thus, Sclove talks about the need to “design [new technologies] to work together as a complementary system applied to an entire technological order.” Too many well-intended researchers focus only on one aspect of the system. The well-known York professor, David Noble, for example, praised the progressive approach to technological development and worker autonomy in a Norwegian factory. However, he failed to point out that the “factory in question was a state-owned weapons production plant.”

In order to ensure that citizens are involved in the design and introduction of humanly comprehensible and comprehensive technological systems, Sclove advocates a set of criteria for a human or democratic technology. These criteria are as follows:

1. Whenever possible, new technologies should be adopted that promote individual freedom, socio-economic equality, and communitarian co-operation. This implies two things: 1) challenging unnecessary centralization of power, and 2) balancing the needs of the individual for freedom with the importance of co-operating as a group.
2. Ensuring that the adoption of any new technologies in the workplace are as humane and humanly fulfilling as possible. This implies: 1) involving working people in envisioning and implementing technological alternatives, and 2) encouraging workers to operate and contribute as part of a team.
3. Whenever possible, using new technologies to empower all the people and limiting their power to disenfranchise groups. This implies: 1) paying attention to real conditions of minorities and women, and 2) designing systems that encourage these groups to participate.
4. Promoting local autonomy and local self-governance wherever possible. This implies: 1) decentralizing power, and 2) making ecological sustainability the responsibility of the local community.
5. Reinforcing local autonomy and self-governance economically by making regions economically self reliant rather than reliant on a remote national or global market. This means: 1) ensuring that regional economies are diversified, and 2) relinquishing as much central control as is economically feasible.
6. Link local communities to national and global communities by promoting the connections between acting locally and thinking globally. This implies: 1) promoting the awareness of eco-system linkages; 2) diffusing an ethic of sustainability within a politics of federation rather than centralization.
7. Avoiding any technologies that could be harmful to the local and the human community generally. This implies: 1) widespread consultation before implementing any new technologies, 2) the delaying or a moratorium on any new technology until all of its potential consequences are understood.
8. Broadening the palate of technological alternatives so as to give people more choice as to the most appropriate technology. This means: 1) decentralizing the process of Research Design and Development, 2) decreasing the number of conditions on, and timetable for, research, and 3) providing adequate funding for local, entrepreneurial, and community based research.

Sclove believes that these recommendations would go a long way towards reversing the technological trend towards local isolation and central authoritarianism. He admits that these suggestions will seem impractical and even utopian in the present climate, where governments and corporations wield immense power over the direction of technology - power that they are not willing to give up, even when the decentralization process is obviously successful. For example, he cites the case of architectural reforms at the University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, where the university administration axed organic architectural reforms designed to “mitigate the alienating architecture of the adjacent hospital.”

Sclove seems to put his faith in the dynamic of an increasing number of local mobilizations “for a democratic politics of technology.” But it is difficult to see how these local initiatives could garner more than isolated successes against the juggernaut of centralization and bureaucratic authoritarianism. It is interesting that Sclove says so little about a major technological development that was occurring while he was writing this article - the so-called information revolution. In many respects, this would appear to be the most important battleground for the democratization of technology.

Jenkins’ Optimistic Vision of the Information Age

Fortunately for our purposes, this is the theme of the article by Timothy Jenkins entitled “Black Futurists in the Information Age.” Jenkins tends to be a little uncritical of the centralizing potential of the computer revolution and altogether too naïve about its democratic potential. Especially when commercialized and consumerized, the computer industry and the World Wide Web are technologies that have some disturbing tendencies that we have seen in other lectures in the course. IT and ICT are technologies whose net utility and benefits to society are far less than their hype. At the same time as they foist the latest technological advances upon us as individuals, they draw us into a global community that is rapidly erasing local differences.

By this, I do not mean to suggest that there are not democratic possibilities in the ability of individuals and groups to communicate with one another, disseminate information, and discuss alternatives. Nor do I dismiss the potential of new technologies for improving health, education and the quality of life. But I think that it is important to ask ourselves who controls these new technologies and for what purposes? IT and ITC give governments and corporations much greater power for surveillance, control and manipulation. The Information Superhighway allows some very powerful groups access into our homes and lives. Moreover, the perceived importance of constantly keeping abreast of new technologies turns us into continually upgrading consumers, while the pleasure that we obtain from our expenditures is questionable. Thus, there are some problems with Jenkins’ overly naïve and optimistic perspective on the information age, not to mention that any link between the information revolution and a higher quality of life is tenuous at best.

Perhaps Jenkins can be forgiven for not addressing some of these issues. After all, he runs a multi-media firm and is personally profiting and being empowered by the Information Age. But there are aspects of his argument that make it more self-serving and devious than merely naïve. First, he clearly wants a leadership position for himself or people like him in the black community. He feels that individuals who rely on moral persuasion rather than accurate information have frozen people like him out of leadership positions. Second, he identifies himself with a managerial/administrative capitalist elite, which makes him something of a problem. The racial divide in America is not simply a matter of colour; it is also a matter of economic class, and, arguably, Jenkins shares the values of his class when he devalues systemic racism in the United States and focuses more on self-reliance. Third, even if you find these criticisms of Jenkins unconvincing, there can be no doubt that he is interested in empowerment primarily for capitalist reasons.

Jenkins continually refers to the fact that the black community is a huge market segment. Blacks and other minorities consumed over $6 billion in electronic equipment and products in 1994 alone and spent more per capita on such products than the general U.S. market. Jenkins’ ideal world is one where capitalists like himself have power and influence in the black community and where blacks consume the multi-media products that he creates. None of this means that Jenkins arguments are invalid, only that we need to put them in perspective. If he and his friends become the gatecrashers of the Information Age, they stand to make a very good profit from this initiative.

That said, let’s look more closely at Jenkins’ particular claims. He suggests that the new information revolution will totally change the nature of society. Those who do not get on the information bandwagon will be left far behind. In real factual terms, they will be economically and socially disenfranchised in the new world - what Jenkins calls “road kill of the Information Superhighway.” The black leadership of the past relied on oratory and moral persuasion to win blacks civil rights and legal equality. They have, however, now fossilized that leadership style and are totally out of touch and completely ill-equipped to lead the black community into a new information age.

For Jenkins, the tragedy here is that the Information Age and emergent technologies will “impact monumentally on every area of human life” and will be the “keys for determining economic, and employment opportunity, freedom of expression, educational attainment and meaningful political participation.” Jenkins points out that factual rather than formal participation is already being undermined by the new realities of competing in the global technological village. Unless the black community participates in the information revolution, they are doomed to become the underclass in a “technological caste system.”

All the while this technological window of opportunity is open, the leadership of the black community have gotten used to “slow dancing” with “majority group power holders.” They fail to realize that, unless they act quickly to ensure “access to computers at home or in school”, the black community will fall so far behind that the “only forces left to determine individual and group access to knowledge” will be “unrestrained market forces.” The window of opportunity for providing access for minority groups is closing. Once class and economic advantage are secured, the window will close forever.

Jenkins is advocating a particular brand of Black capitalism, one that recognizes the potential market for computer products in the black community and that elevates the people who provide these goods to leadership positions. Despite his attacks on the crude cash register nexus and the “backward corporate attitude”, Jenkins clearly identifies with modern management that uses spread sheets, statistical information, and that processes information efficiently. This viewpoint helps to explain Jenkins’ particular slant on black history. He believes that black leadership began as preachers, who were accepted because they invoked divine rather than earthly power. From there, it moved to teachers, who were acceptable because they were part of the social structure and could be easily controlled. Eventually, black leadership shifted to lawyers and doctors as professionally “safe agents” of change in the community.

The new role that Jenkins invokes for the black leader is that of the revolutionary capitalist, who has a “bold” view of economic realities and the managerial expertise to implement change. Thus, he advocates a social revolution wherein managerial capitalists like himself are the authority figures. The managerial style of capitalism that Jenkins advocates resembles scientific management in its emphasis on statistics, systems, and procedures and in its condemnation of the “widespread organizational dysfunction” of a black community that is in serious denial of the new economic reality. That denial is shown in the tendency of the black community to blame all social ills on systemic racism rather than to focus on the need for internal and individual reform.

Jenkins commitment to Black capitalism is further demonstrated in his dismissal of public solutions to social problems. Thus, he cites the “shortcomings” of “occasionally destabilized institutions” that turn out to be housing authorities, welfare agencies, churches, colleges, public school systems, subsidized health and housing, etc. These are, in large part, the “crux of the problem”. The solution is the modern scientific manager who understands the “necessary connection between valid information management and desired outcomes.”

In addition to being an advocate of Black capitalism, Jenkins also appears as something of a technocrat in his insistence that, unless the black community gets on the information bandwagon soon, the result will be “catastrophic” and the result will be “permanent Depression-like conditions”. In other words, the technological imperative is the external condition that requires a kind of compliance that “traditional leadership types” cannot achieve without a “radical metamorphosis.” While Jenkins attacks the “fiery sound bites” of traditional black leaders, his own advocacy of the leadership black technologists as revolutionary gatecrashers hardly constitutes a more “sober analysis”. Indeed, he is even willing to invoke the anything but sober analysis of Malcolm X, when he suggests that we need to establish access to the Information Superhighway “by any means necessary.”

What does this leadership revolution amount to in reality? Two things. First, the rule of a new kind of management that understands “systems analysis, computer literacy, multimedia, and telecommunications. Second, a readjustment of the relationship between the domestic economy and “worldwide labour and capital markets.” Third, a “dedicated effort to recycle the purchasing power of the black community.” This final agenda turns out to be of tremendous significance, since Jenkins goes into great detail on how a new style of leadership could act as a broker to the $450 billion in earnings and consumer power within the black community.

At the end of the article, Jenkins makes a sop to the traditional black leadership by calling for a marriage of old-style morality and modern technology that he calls the “high-touch of the world of high-tech.” But take away such platitudes and the references to reversing the future of disenfranchised blacks and the only real marriage that you are left with is the one between capitalism and technology. In fact, Jenkins has eliminated much of the social (i.e. public) framework that controlled and humanized technology. If the black community wants to be vibrant, it has to adapt to a technological future that is shaped by capitalists operating within a global market.

Conclusion

Sclove provides us with a model for assessing the pros and cons of any new technology in terms of its impact on democratic politics and personal empowerment. It is not a simple model but one that contains a number of related criteria that are supposed to “work together in a complementary system applied to an entire technological order.” These criteria are designed to significantly limit and shape the introduction of any new technologies. If you agree with Sclove that technology needs to be controlled and shaped in a human and humane direction, then his “democratic politics of technology” makes good sense.

One of the problems with Sclove’s analysis is that it doesn’t really take into account the power of centralized institutions, corporations and bureaucracies to set the technological agenda. It appears somewhat naïve, idealistic, and perhaps even archaic in its attempt to return to a social word where local communities had a great deal of power over technology. Moreover, it barely touches upon the most dramatic technological developments since the Industrial Revolution - the development of an Information Society.

Jenkins deals explicitly with modern technology, in the form of the IT and ICT revolution. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really provide a framework for humanizing technology apart from some platitudes about combining high tech with high-touch. Despite the fact that he wants to empower a disadvantaged community, his socio-economic agenda is much more right wing and more distinctly technocratic than the argument advanced by Sclove. Jenkins wants the black community to embrace new technology and to ride the opportunities to personal empowerment and group advancement. An unfriendly critic might suggest that, at best, the advantages will accrue to a relatively small percentage of capitalists and symbolic workers in the black community. Moreover, Jenkins’ plan to mobilize black spending power would appear to focus on the roles of blacks as passive consumers of technological products rather than their empowerment. People like Jenkins might have increased status and wealth as a result of embracing the Information Society and the Global Village. It is more difficult to see how the black community as a whole will profit from the Information Age.

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/