A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

The following is an abridged version of the above work. I believe the following encapsulates the main thrust of the subject but for the total picture, I recommend you read the whole work located at http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/tdet01.html

Introduction

Scholars who study the history of communications technologies or media include historians of technology and of literacy, sociologists, economists, political scientists, anthropologists and technologists such as computer scientists. A central controversy concerns how far technology does or does not condition social change. Each commentator emphasizes different factors in technological change. No neat explanation is adequate and rigorous proof is difficult if not impossible.

In this kind of arena it is wise to beware of generalizing too widely. In particular, it helps to be aware of the nature and pitfalls of a very persuasive stance known as technological determinism (or occasionally 'media determinism'). This is still the most popular and influential theory of the relationship between technology and society, but it has been increasingly subject to critical review by scholars in recent times. Students need to be aware that the term 'deterministic' tends to be a negative one for many social scientists, and modern sociologists in particular often use the word as a term of abuse.

Technological determinism seeks to explain social and historical phenomena in terms of one principal or determining factor. It is a doctrine of historical or causal primacy. The term 'technological determinism' was apparently coined by the American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) (Ellul 1964: xviii; Jones 1990: 210).

Technology-led theories

The technological determinist view is a technology-led theory of social change: technology is seen as 'the prime mover' in history. In economics, this is known as a 'technology-push' theory rather than a 'demand-pull' theory. According to technological determinists, particular technical developments, communications technologies or media, or, most broadly, technology in general are the sole or prime antecedent causes of changes in society, and technology is seen as the fundamental condition underlying the pattern of social organization.

Technological determinists interpret technology in general and communications technologies in particular as the basis of society in the past, present and even the future. They say that technologies such as writing or print or television or the computer 'changed society'. In its most extreme form, the entire form of society is seen as being determined by technology: new technologies transform society at every level, including institutions, social interaction and individuals. At the least a wide range of social and cultural phenomena are seen as shaped by technology. 'Human factors' and social arrangements are seen as secondary.

Reductionism

Technological determinism focuses on causality - cause and effect relationships - a focus typically associated with 'scientific' explanation ...(and) involves reductionism, which aims to reduce a complex whole to the effects of one part (or parts) upon another part (or parts).

Reductionism contrasts with 'holism', which is broadly concerned with the whole phenomenon and with complex interactions within it rather than with the study of isolated parts. In holistic interpretations there are no single, independent causes. Holistic interpretation proceeds from the whole and relationships are presented as non-directional or non-linear.

Theory-making always requires simplification, and reductionism has proved useful in the natural sciences, but reductionism is widely criticized as a way of approaching social phenomena.

Technological determinists often seem to be trying to account for almost everything in terms of technology: a perspective which we may call technocentrism. To such writers we are first and foremost 'Homo faber' - tool-makers and tool-users. The American Benjamin Franklin apparently first coined the phrase that 'man is a tool-using animal'. Thomas Carlyle echoed this in 1841, adding that 'without tools he is nothing; with them he is all.

The British biologist Sir Peter Medawar has argued that technological evolution has contributed more to our biological success than our biological evolution (Ong 1986 p. 33). In other words, he too suggests that in developing technologies, we shape ourselves.

Social systems are functions of technologies; and philosophies express technological forces and reflect social systems. (White 1949, p. 366).

This bears some similarity to Marx and Engel's theory of historical materialism according to which the institutional 'superstructure' of society (which includes politics, education, the family and culture) rests on an economic (some say techno-economic) 'base' or foundation, and major historical change proceeds from base to superstructure.

Mechanistic Models

Reductionism, like technological determinism in general, is a mechanistic mode of explanation associated with positivism: a philosophical stance based strictly on the scientific method.

Machines serve a designated function and operate strictly according to cause and effect. Within the context of their mechanisms, causes are explicit and intentional and consequences are predictable. Machines are characterized by their relentless and rigid regularity. They are assembled from parts and can be analysed or disassembled into them.

Mechanistic models have obvious deficiencies when applied to social phenomena. The use of complex and interacting technologies may have implications which are not always entirely intended or predicted. And the complex fabric of social reality cannot be neatly analysed into component factors. Machines are also under complete control - we can turn them off - which one might expect to appeal to voluntarists of a rationalist bent. However, we may also need to consider to what extent the user may become part of a complex machine when using it.

Reification

Associated with technological determinism is reification. To reify is to 'thingify': to treat an abstraction as a material thing. Reifying 'Technology' involves treating it as if it were a single material thing with a homogeneous, undifferentiated character.

Technology is often seen as a whole which is more than the sum of its parts, or various manifestations. However, as Seymour Melman observes 'there is no machine in general' (1972, p. 59). Similarly, the umbrella term 'mass communication' covers a multitude of very different media. And even categories such as 'writing', 'print', 'literacy', 'television' or 'the computer' encompass considerable diversity. Referring loosely to such abstract categories is hazardous. Some technologies may also be less determining than others; the flexibility or 'openness' of tools varies. And of course a technology cannot be cut off as a separate thing from specific contexts of use: technology has many manifestations in different social contexts. A single technology can serve many quite different purposes.

Reification is a difficult charge to avoid, since any use of linguistic categorization (including words such as 'society' or 'culture') could be said to involve reification. Theorizing about technology and society is full of reification, quite apart from these two key terms. Reification is involved when we divide human experience into 'spheres' variously tagged as 'social', 'cultural', 'educational', 'political', 'ideological', 'philosophical', 'religious', 'legal', 'industrial', 'economic', 'scientific' or 'technological'. If such separation proceeds beyond analytical convenience it also involves what is called structural autonomy.

Lived experience is a seamless web, but academia in particular encourages specialists to indulge in reductionist interpretation. Structuralist sociological theories emphasize that social institutions interact as an inter-related system; none act as independent 'causes' (although theorists differ in the importance which they ascribe to particular factors). It is not adequate to suggest that what shapes technology is science, since science is also socially shaped, and technology also influences science (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985, p. 8). Rather than being 'outside' society, technology is an inextricable part of it.

The debate over technology and society is typically polarized into an emphasis either on technological factors or on socio-cultural factors. Within this reificatory framework economic factors tend to be lumped either with technological ones or with socio-cultural ones.

Technological Autonomy

Closely associated with reification is another feature of technological determinism whereby technology is presented as autonomous (or sometimes 'semi-autonomous'): it is seen as a largely external - 'outside' of society, 'supra-social' or 'exogenous' (as opposed to 'endogenous'). Rather than as a product of society and an integral part of it, technology is presented as an independent, self-controlling, self-determining, self-generating, self-propelling, self-perpetuating and self-expanding force. It is seen as out of human control, changing under its own momentum and 'blindly' shaping society.

The sense that technology may be out of control is also influenced by the way in which technical developments can lead to unforeseen 'side-effects'.

The most famous theorist adopting this perspective was the sociologist Jacques Ellul in his book The Technological Society. Ellul declared that 'Technique has become autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which has renounced all tradition' (Ellul 1964 p. 14). He presented complex interdependent technological systems as being shaped by technology itself rather than by society.

Ellul declared that 'there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy' (Ellul 1964, p. 138). He insisted that technological autonomy reduces the human being to 'a slug inserted into a slot machine' (p. 135). Critics of the notion of technological autonomy argue that technology is itself shaped by society and is subject to human control.

The notion of technology having its own purposes is widespread. Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1882) declared that: 'Things are in the saddle,/ And ride mankind' ('Ode, inscribed to W. H. Channing'). Marshall McLuhan asserted that 'in... any social action, the means employed discover their own goals', adding that 'new goals [are] contained in... new means' (McLuhan & Watson 1970, p. 202).

For some more serious theorists technology (or technique) is presented as an autonomous force but not as a conscious being with 'a will of its own'. For such theorists technological autonomy may refer primarily to the ways in which a technology apparently under control for the purpose for which it is used can have unpredictable and cumulative knock-on influences on the use of and 'need' for other technologies. Such 'repercussions' are not direct and immediate consequences.

A serious concern of the critics of technological determinism is that a belief in the autonomy of technology may deter those who feel helpless from intervening in technological development. The stance of technological autonomy could then be seen as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The 'Technological Imperative'

Some critics who use the term 'technological determinism' equate it simply with this notion of inevitability, which is also referred to as 'The technological imperative'. The doctrine of the technological imperative is that because a particular technology means that we can do something (it is technically possible) then this action either ought to (as a moral imperative), must (as an operational requirement) or inevitably will (in time) be taken (see Hasan Ozbekhan 1968).

The technological imperative is a common assumption amongst commentators on 'new technologies'. They tell us, for instance, that the 'information technology revolution' is inevitably on its way and our task as users is to learn to cope with it.

Those who pursue certain problems primarily because they are 'technically sweet' are following the technological imperative. It implies a suspension of ethical judgement or social control: individuals and society are seen as serving the requirements of a technological system which shapes their purposes.

Technology as Neutral or Non-neutral

Some critics argue against technological determinism on the grounds that technology is 'neutral' or 'value-free' (neither good or bad in itself), and that what counts is not the technology but the way in which we choose to use it. Michael Shallis notes that an (instrumental) belief in the neutrality of technology is also commonly associated with technological determinism. Shallis argues that 'accepting the proposition that... technology... [is] neutral... means accepting the technological imperative' (Shallis 1984, p. 95). Technologists usually argue that technology is neutral.

Some theorists who posit technological autonomy are also amongst the wider group of those who have insisted on the non-neutrality of technology, arguing that we cannot merely 'use' technology without also, to some extent, being influenced or 'used by' it.

Technical development is neither good, bad, nor neutral' (Ellul 1990, p. 37) We become conditioned by our technological systems or environments.

The McLuhanite John Culkin declared that 'we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us' (in Stearn 1968, p. 60).

Many deterministic commentators on the 'non-neutrality' of tools argue that the tools we use determine our view of the world.

Postman insists that 'the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information' (Postman 1979, p. 39)

'Technology remains a very human tool, used by some against others' (Pursell 1994, p. 219).

Universalism

Another feature of technological determinism is universalism: a particular technology (such as writing, print or electronic media) - or its absence - is seen as universally linked to the same basic social pattern. Universalism is 'asocial' and 'ahistorical': presented as outside the framework of any specific socio-cultural and historical context.

But particular technologies are not universally associated with similar social patterns. 'The same technology can have very different "effects" in different situations' (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985, p. 6). The implications of the use of a particular communication technology vary according to different historical and cultural circumstances. Even within cultures, the use of such technologies varies amongst individuals, groups and sub-cultures.

Techno-Evolution as 'Progress'

Also associated with technological determinism is techno-evolutionism.

Techno-evolutionary theorists define progress in terms of successive stages of technological development, frequently portrayed as 'revolutions' leading to historical 'eras' defined by this or that technology:

Such tidy stages misleadingly tend to suggest that new technologies replace old ones. What is more common is an interplay between newer and older media which may involve subtle shifts of function. Television didn't replace radio or the cinema, and computers seem unlikely to replace books. Harvey Graff adds that history cannot be easily reduced to simple linear 'progress': there are 'variable paths to societal change' (Graff 1987, p. 35).

Far-reaching social 'effects', both optimistic and pessimistic, have been claimed for many communications technologies before our current computer-based 'information technology'. The so-called 'I.T. revolution' (which tends to be presented as the 'final' communications revolution) can be seen as having been preceded by the 'writing revolution' and 'the print revolution', and as only the latest phase of an 'electronics revolution' which began with telegraphy and telephony. And all of these technologies can be seen as information technologies.

Enthusiasm for technological 'progress' typically involves technological determinism.

However, technological determinists are not always enthusiastic and optimistic:

Pessimistic determinism is often little short of a fatalism which tells us that there is no escape. And it is commonly associated with a general anti-modernism.

Theoretical Stances

Deterministic perspectives have been common amongst commentators on communication technologies. Theorists who have argued that changes in communication technologies have had an important cultural impact have tended either to regard such changes as limited to social and institutional practices or, far more radically, have argued that such changes have also had profound psychological consequences, transforming the nature of human consciousness. This radical claim of psychic change is dubbed by Michael Heim 'the transformation theory' (Heim 1987).

The association of different media with particular cognitive consequences by McLuhan and others can be seen as related to linguistic as well as technological determinism. And it is this variety of determinism which is sometimes referred to as media determinism. McLuhan equated communications media and technologies with language, and ...argued that all media do this. A moderate version of media determinism is that our use of particular media may have subtle influences on us, but that it is the social context of use which is crucial.

Critics have sometimes made a distinction is sometimes between 'hard' and 'soft' technological determinism, the latter allowing somewhat more scope for human control and cultural variation.

Strong (or hard) technological determinism is the extreme stance that a particular communication technology is either a sufficient condition (sole cause) determining social organization and development, or at least a necessary condition (requiring additional preconditions).

Weak (or soft) technological determinism, more widely accepted by scholars, claims that the presence of a particular communication technology is an enabling or facilitating factor leading to potential opportunities which may or may not be taken up in particular societies or periods.

In defence of human control over technology, Seymour Melman notes that in modern times 'there is no unique... technology option. There is an array of options' (Melman 1972, p. 57). A technique or technology does not create or change itself. 'Technology does not, indeed cannot, determine itself' (p. 58). And the sociologist Ruth Finnegan adds that 'the medium in itself cannot give rise to social consequences - it must be used' (Finnegan 1975, p. 108).

With regard to communications media, the voluntarist stance opposed to media determinism is sometimes referred to as audience determinism, whereby instead of media being presented as doing things to people the emphasis is on people doing things with media.

Some commentators on technology and society have adopted the stance of social or cultural determinism, according to which technologies and techniques are entirely determined by social and political factors. Socio-cultural determinism sometimes leaves as little room for individual agency as extreme technological determinism leaves to social control. The more moderate and widespread stance is that technology is socially conditioned but not entirely socially determined (see Benthall 1976, pp. 146-7).

Whilst communication technology is generally acknowledged to be an important factor in facilitating social organization and change, most academic commentators would now see it as only one factor amongst others. Close studies of particular social contexts by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and others have suggested that social change is too complex and subtle to be explained solely in terms of changes in the media of communication. Grand theories ignore the importance of socio-historical contexts. Social change involves an interaction of social, cultural and economic forces as well as scientific and technological influences.

Deterministic Language

As an interpretive bias, technological determinism is often an inexplicit, taken-for-granted assumption which is assumed to be 'self-evident'. Persuasive writers can make it seem like 'natural' common sense: it is presented as an unproblematic 'given'.

Marshall McLuhan's work is full of the language of technological determinism (McLuhan 1962, 1964, 1969; McLuhan & Fiore 1967). McLuhan saw changes in the dominant medium of communication as the main determinant of major changes in society, culture and the individual.

Conclusion

In the past social scientists (except perhaps economic historians and geographers) have tended to neglect the significance of both technology and of communication. Perhaps sociologists above all - whom one would have expected to study communication - have tended in the past to take an anti-technological line; they have preferred instead to follow Durkheim, one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, in stressing "the social" as something autonomous and causally independent of such mechanical factors as technology.

It is a great mistake to jump from the conclusion that the relationship between technology and society is not simple to the conclusion that the use of a particular technology in a specific context has no consequences at all. Any technological change which is great enough is likely to produce some social change. And some of these changes may be widespread and major.

Technology is one of a number of mediating factors in human behaviour and social change, which both acts on and is acted on by other phenomena.

Related Reading

Please note that I have included the complete listing from the original work.

Asimov, Isaac (1981): Asimov on Science Fiction. New York: Avon

Baumann, Gerd (Ed.) (1986): The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Benthall, Jonathan (1976): The Body Electric: Patterns of Western Industrial Culture. London: Thames & Hudson

Buchanan, R. A. (1994): The Power of the Machine. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Clanchy, Michael T (1979): From Memory to Written Record. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Cross, Nigel, David Elliott & Robin Roy (Eds.) (1974): Man-Made Futures: Readings in Society, Technology and Design. London: Hutchinson

Dubos, Rene (1970): So Human an Animal. London: Hart-Davis

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L (1980): The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ellul, Jacques (1964): The Technological Society . New York: Vintage

Ellul, Jacques (1990): The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans

Finnegan, Ruth (1975): 'Communication and Technology'. Unit 8 of the Open University Correspondence Course, Making Sense of Society, Block 3, Communication. Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Finnegan, Ruth, Graeme Salaman & Kenneth Thompson (Eds.) (1987): Information Technology: Social Issues. London: Hodder & Stoughton/Open University

Finnegan, Ruth (1988): Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Gall, John (1979): Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. London: Fontana

Goody, Jack (Ed.) (1968): Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Graff, Harvey J. (1987): The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present. London: Falmer Press

Hall, Edward T. (1966): The Hidden Dimension: Man's Use of Space in Public and Private. London: Bodley Head

Heidegger, Martin (1977): The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (trans. William Lovitt). New York: Harper & Row

Ihde, Don (1979): Technics and Praxis (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 24). Dordrecht: Reidel

Innis, Harold (1951): The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Jennings, Paul (1960): 'Report on Resistentialism'. In Dwight Macdonald (Ed.): Parodies. London: Faber

Jones, Barry (1990): Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work Melbourne: Oxford University Press

Large, Peter (1980): The Micro Revolution. London: Fontana

MacKenzie, Donald & Judy Wajcman (Eds.) (1985): The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got its Hum. Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Mander, Jerry (1978): Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Morrow

McLuhan, Marshall (1962): The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

McLuhan, Marshall (1964): Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Mentor

McLuhan, Marshall (1969): Counterblast. London: Rapp & Whiting

McLuhan, Marshall & Quentin Fiore (1967): The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam

McLuhan, Marshall & Wilfred Watson (1970): From Cliche to Archetype. New York: Viking Press

Melman, Seymour (1972): 'The Myth of Autonomous Technology'. In Cross et al. (1974), op. cit.

Mowshowitz, Abbe (1976): The Conquest of Will: Information Processing in Human Affairs. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley

Mumford, Lewis (1971): The Pentagon of Power. London: Secker & Warburg

Ong, Walter (1986): 'Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought'. In Gerd Baumann (Ed.), op. cit.

O'Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders & John Fiske (1983): Key Concepts in Communication. London: Methuen

Ozbekhan, Hasan (1968): 'The Triumph of Technology - "Can" implies "Ought"'. In Cross et al. (1974), op. cit.

Pacey, Arnold (1983): The Culture of Technology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Postman, Neil (1979): Teaching as a Conserving Activity. New York: Dell

Postman, Neil (1983): The Disappearance of Childhood. London: W H Allen

Postman, Neil (1993): Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage

Potter, David & Philip Sarre (Eds.) (1974): Dimensions of Society: A Reader. London: University of London Press/Open University Press

Pursell, Carroll (1994): White Heat. London: BBC

Robins, Kevin & Frank Webster (1989): The Technical Fix: Education, Computers and Industry. London: Macmillan

Shallis, Michael (1984): The Silicon Idol: The Micro Revolution and its Social Implications. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stearn, Gerald E. (Ed.) (1968): McLuhan Hot & Cool. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Street, Brian V. (1984): Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Toffler, Alvin (1983): Previews and Premises. London: Pan

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1976): Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman

White, Leslie A. (1949): The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Grove Press

White, Lynn Jr. (1978): Medieval Technology and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press

Williams, Raymond (1981a): Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana

Williams, Raymond (Ed.) (1990): Television: Technology and Cultural Form (2nd edn.). London: Routledge

Winner, Langdon (1977): Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

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