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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.