Some bloggers do something called ‘live blogging’ from conferences, wherein they aim to note, more-or-less verbatim, the content of the sessions they are attending. I am far too busy with other weighty intellectual matters at conferences - Twitter messages about the speakers’ funny haircuts and who else is here from Twitter — so it takes me a few more days.
Anyway, I was at Media Futures 08 last Friday where one of the best sessions was the opening keynote from Dr. Brian Winston.
He started with a quotation ostensibly* from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in the Observer saying that it’s likely there’ll soon be digital revolutions in far-flung places we don’t tend to consider very much, such as Kazakhstan. With internet connections and the Web 2.0 tools that have become available over recent years, Wales says, it’s likely that they’ll be able to propel themselves very quickly through twenty years of technological progress and produce the next crop of internet tycoons.
Nonsense, said Winston. What both Wales and Wikipedia forget is that Kazakhstan has a Stalinist dictatorship. There will need to be a very different sort of revolution before there’s any kind of technological one that’s based on democratising technologies. It’s an example of the way Web 2.0 technophiles seem to find it extremely easy to forget about politics, sociology and history to try to establish the revolutionary impact of the next latest thing. They think technology has the power to change societies, whereas in actual fact, cultural and social conditions need to be met in order for technological advances to exist at all.
Digital itself has a history going back to the 1920s, he argued, which everyone conveniently forgets. And even then, it’s simply a system for encoding things. An equivalent would be the switch from AM to FM radio — and very few people talk about the FM revolution.
We are in a condition where we conveniently forget the years of discovery, exploration and mistakes that lead to whatever is in today’s headlines. We’re also conditioned into accepting the rhetoric of marketing as fact. Web 2.0 favourite theories like ‘the wisdom of crowds’, ‘the hype cycle’ and ‘crossing the chasm’ are actually commercial products, not independent academic studies.
The conditions for the emergence of new technology are cultural, not inherent in those technologies themselves. Edison didn’t ever envisage the gramophone being used to record music, because the likelihood of that use was not culturally probable at that time. The ability to create cheap electric cars has existed for years, but has only been allowed to come to life relatively recently as car companies have reached a point where they want to be viewed as environmentally responsible. And many new technologies — so breathlessly announced in the tech press and the press releases that spawn them as so very new and revolutionary — are based on fairly basic facts about the human race. People like to talk — if that’s via mobile phone, social networks or face-to-face maybe doesn’t make that much difference. We would do it anyway within the limits of whatever means we had available.
When we’re confronted with the latest, greatest, revolutionary product from the web or anywhere else, the proper response ought to be, ‘so what?’ It’s likely that there will be no sensible answer to that question, but even if there is, it will probably be about it fulfilling or adding to a social imperative that already exists. Technology, Winston argued, is not going to create new social needs or desires.
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Personally, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, and I think it’s true that society creates technology, not vice-versa.
However, I didn’t used to need to know the day’s news at 7am in the morning. I didn’t used to read hundreds of people’s opinions every day. I didn’t used to hear from my friends and colleagues every day (albeit indirectly through blogs and social networks) and thus feel continuously part of an international professional community. While I could have created a printed fanzine instead of this blog, I probably wouldn’t have been bothered. It’s often remarked that before mobile phones were ubiquitous, you had to turn up to social engagements instead of cancelling. And there was a time when if I wanted to watch Dr. Who, then I had to be sat at home at 5pm on a Saturday. Some of those things are about the increasing demands for communication and information required by a post-industrial society that still needs to make a living, but not all of them.
Mobiles and web things and social networks may have come to exist as a consequence of social and cultural demand, but the consequences of their existence also go beyond what those causes required. There then emerges a two-way process whereby technology both fulfils social needs and then is stretched to create new patterns of behaviour as we tinker and test the new limits of our existence. Another basic fact about humans is that we are tinkerers and testers. Not always all of us, but enough of us to alter the nature of common discourse over time.
*Wales has since repudiated the article quoted in Winston’s talk, which was apparently written by a third party on the basis of a conversation, and has written a new one, which is more moderate in its position regarding developing economies.
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I’m no fan of Web 2.0, but I’d tend to disagree.
Slavery was abolished in the British Empire about one generation after the industrial revolution begin. Textbooks tell us that the consciences of great men like Wilberforce did it all, and they certainly did a lot, but so did the fact that machines were appearing which could do the work much cheaper than even slaves could. Is it entirely coincidence that both things happened first in the UK and then diffused outwards? I’d say that’s a clear-cut (and very important) case of technology causing a social revolution.
Wales’ case is basically a rehearsal of all the usual arguments about Emerging Markets, but applied to one very specific market segment. Is it credible? I think so. Kazakhstan is one of the “new rich” nations that are building their wealth on the resource crunch, and has a lot of capital inflow. If it follows the path that the Russian Federation has taken, then it will acquire an emergent young middle class, and that middle class will want to be connected. I think where Wales’ argument falls down is that in a country rich with natural resources, entrepreneurs won’t necessarily want to become Internet tycoons, but that doesn’t mean that these countries don’t have vibrant online communities or will continue to do so.
Hi Ian — I’ve been struggling with coming up for an answer to your extremely pertinent comment for a week. Hope you get an email about it and apologies for the delay.
You’re right — the abolition of slavery was, at least partially, about technology. But it was also about society — society had moved into the Romantic era . There was a recognition of the individual, which had not existed heretofore, especially not for peasant and slave scum. There was a revolution of ideas before any industrial revolution took place.
But, I stand by my final comment about a two-way process. There is a systemic thing going on between technology and society. The one informs and allows the other. There’s been technology for 20 years, for example, for electric cars, but it’s only now that we see them on the streets.
If I may add Yochai Benkler’s thoughts on technology determinism/non-determinism here. In the intro to Wealth of Networks (section of Four Methodological Comments) he states his perspective on technology:
“Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense — if you have technology “t,” you should expect social structure or relation “s” to emerge — is false.
Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. In a challenging environment — be the challenges natural or human — it can make some behaviors obsolete by increasing the efficacy of directly competitive strategies. However, within the realm of the feasible — uses not rendered impossible by the adoption or rejection of a technology — different patterns of adoption and use can result in very different social relations that emerge around a technology. Unless these patterns are in competition, or unless even in competition they are not catastrophically less effective at meeting the challenges, different societies can persist with different patterns of use over long periods. … The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so. ”
Apologies for the long comment. The full txt can be accesed here: http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-01.htm#1–3
Quite. Technology <> Society.
But in terms of technology being discovered and then being propagated — they are two quite different things. Unfortunately. I expect it’s possible to make cars run on sea water right now, but vested interests mean that we won’t see that technology until the last penny has been extorted for petrol. Technologies don’t ‘exist’ until the correct socioeconomic conditions are met.
But now I sound like a conspiracy theorist, don’t I?
I have to agree with Ian Kemmish. Technological determinism seems very unfashionable these days. But all my reasoning points to its greater importance. History is full of technology as instigator of change. Just think of the gunpowder, radio, printing, white goods and the pill.
Although its supposition guess what might happen if we removed the machine? Would we return to serfs and slavery or would the “social revolution” suppress the need for cheap labour?
The point is we are looking for factors that change society overall. The usual elements are culture, economics, geography, politics, technology. They are generally all lumped to together as equal factors. But they really have different characteristics.
Culture, economics and politics are based on intimate human feelings. They are all based on our intimate needs and desires. Their sphere is our hopes and desires. Now depending on your view of the human spirit these things do not change in hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
Technology is far more like geography in that it is external and forms part of the environment. It has the possibility to change far more rapidly than the strictly social based elements.
I’m not utopian about this and think geography often trumps technology. I don’t think you can predict what will happen but it does seem to instigate change.
Look at the panic over obesity at the moment. Individually people are eating too much, because they have access to cheap food. The cheap food is a result of technology. The economic desire for cheap food is pretty much eternal and global. But the newest factor is the mix is technology.
Someone of the left could argue that the fattening food is the result of capitalist manufacture. But then level of social repression needed to stop access to cheap high energy food is severe. Imagine prohibition on sugar.
I would also argue that technology is feeding the growth in market globalization. It decreases the barriers between unbalanced markets. It is in a feedback loop.
I can see how technological determinism has become distrusted by the Left. But it is worth remembering that Marx was a determinist who said “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist”
I agree everything is never equal. But some things maybe constant such as the human spirit.
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