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.