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Technology + Information – Society = ?

Technology + Information – Society = ?. COMN 2312, Jan 25 Lecture. Announcement. Prophetic McLuhan – Douglas Coupland in Conversation with B.W. Powe Jan 28, 2011, 4pm- 6pm Douglas Coupland in conversation with B.W. Powe on Coupland's new biography of Marshall McLuhan.

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Technology + Information – Society = ?

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  1. Technology + Information – Society = ? COMN 2312, Jan 25 Lecture

  2. Announcement • Prophetic McLuhan – Douglas Coupland in Conversation with B.W. Powe • Jan 28, 2011, 4pm-6pm • Douglas Coupland in conversation with B.W. Powe on Coupland's new biography of Marshall McLuhan. • Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Microserfs, will be speaking on his new biography of Marshall McLuhan. • The event will be part of the launch of Marshall McLuhan centenary celebrations that will be taking place throughout Canada, the United States and Europe • Location: Founders College Assembly Hall • Sponsor: The McLuhan Initiative, Founders College, Department of English and Canadian Studies • See http://www.yorku.ca/yuevents/index.asp?Event=21938&Category=0&ShowCal=&TimeSame=Jan&Month=1&Year=2011&EventTitle=York%20Events:%20Prophetic+McLuhan+%96+Douglas+Coupland+in+Conversation+with+B.W.+Powe

  3. Agenda • Innis, McLuhan (Canada) • Benjamin, Ellul, Illich (Classic critical technology interests from Non North American perspective • Manovich, Winner – Sample of US critical technology • Next week: Manovich, Gender and Technology

  4. Critical Technology studies • Huge field • Every country has its contributors • So many will not be studied: next week in addition to gender and technology we will do a brief survey of the many contributors

  5. Ellul • In a post war era, a technological optimism was pervasive: one might think it inexplicable in view of the destruction of the war – but one must remember that the war was not in North America – and that technology helped rebuild Europe • This optimism was united with the 1950’s and its motifs of technologizing the domestic household • “Third” world countries – development was seen as the key to world progress • Though Hiroshima and other technological fault lines had well emerged – they were not allowed (for varied reasons) to become culturally visible (Still not allowed to be visible) • The cold war provided the drama, around which a distraction could occur and technological competence was reasserted as a answer

  6. Ellul • Ellul began his career concerned like many who witnessed the rise of Hitler, and other fascist and totalitarian regimes – with propaganda • Ellul watched (and heard through the radio) Hitler and Mussolini rise to power. • He became concerned about how the state merges with media. • He became concerned about how the state wins social approval by using social mechanisms combined with media • He watched as the Fascist leaders in Europe demonstrated their comprehension of the importance of every day rituals and also non-everyday rituals to this process

  7. Ellul • Propaganda is key to helping a society give its freedom away • “This need of a certain cultural level to make people susceptible to propaganda is best understood if one looks at one of propaganda’s most important devices, the manipulation of symbols. The more an individual participates in the society in which he lives, the more he will cling to stereotyped symbols expressing collective notions about the past and the future of his group. The more stereotypes in a culture, the easier it is to form public opinion, and the more an individual participates in that culture, the more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation of these symbols.” From Propaganda (written across his career and published finally in 1973)

  8. Ellul • Propaganda is key to helping a society give its freedom away • Propaganda does not advertise this as it agenda • Propaganda indeed seems to be very much about something else than giving freedom away. • Propaganda is very much about offering optimism, and “copies” of freedom • Propaganda is about symbolic exchanges based on the culture of symbols that exist in a culture • In our culture we are vulnerable symbolically to the idea of progress, through technology, this has replaced the sacred symbolic systems that once unified western society and become the new symbolic unifier, undergirding western social order

  9. Ellul • Ellul uses this Hegelian dialectic to explore the way in which technology seems to offer humankind progress but instead actualizes its own form as progress, • The costs of technology is living with its forms • Living with these forms is presented as freedom • However this freedom when viewed from a macro angle – is not actual freedom • Technology is free to develop (to progress) • Humanity is free to adapt to this technology • This adaptation has its costs, many of these are de-centered and de marginalized (left to occur off screen, out of sight, worked by the symbolic order – so they are not seen though they might be in view • Viewed on the small scale these costs seem marginal at the time, • Viewed from a macro angle – these cost can seem horrific, akin to learning to live with in a leviathan • As Ellul lives across several “ages” – he can see the losses – the freedoms that have been sacrificed with the advent of each new technological arrival

  10. Technological determinism • In the Technological Society, ELLUL’s classic work, Ellul uses sociology to trace technology as phenomenon interpenetrating all aspects of social life including work, and sees this as a means of waking up society to the propaganda of our age. • He is especially concerned regards the relationship of human freedom to its technology • He is dependent on Marx for this trace: • Marx was concerned to critic Hegel’s optimism regards historical evolution and progress • He works to show how – though technology offers progress with each progression technology because the “case” that we are living in • Technology contains us in its forms – thus we must be realistic about the “optimism” it offers in terms of freedom • We are inside a leviathan ,(Jonah and the whale) this is our situation • Technology has its own order which is remarkably similar to organic order – including its decay • Our hope in this has to do with being willing to be human more than we are willing to be technology – it is a smaller hope than we first thought, but perhaps more powerful in view of technologies inevitable decays (another hope)

  11. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Multi-national influence: Austrian by birth: Serbian–Croatian Jewish heritage, multi-lingual in Serbian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Latin, Greek • Studies crystallography • Some argue that his concept of conviviality is a term that has roots in all of his languages including the way in which crystals grow and flourish

  12. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Influenced by scientist: Michael Polanyi and his brother Karl Polyani a political economist • Polanyi (s) Hungarian thinkers who emphasize the social construction of knowledge: • Absolute objectivity (objectivism) is a delusion • Knowledge is constructed through communal conversations under conditions favorable to such construction • Knowledge is socially nourished, this nourishment included the multi-sensual human form and its community of senses • Knowledge appears as disengaged from local context but is always tacit – that is it is always learned through processes that interact with the contextual locus of the body and thus is localized • Tools as means of learning

  13. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Also influenced by the socialist movements that arise in the wake of Vatican II, in which the priesthood becomes concerned with liberation and the movement of “liberation theology” • Liberation theology has many roots but arises in South America as it responds to it colonial past: • Marxist concern for the oppressed is connected to the Moses story; in Liberation Theology there is a concern to address the oppression and poverty that is part of how many South American countries have come to technology • South America as battlefield for capitalism and communism – in which both trap humans in mechanics of industrialized poverty, and a connected racism, and a propaganda war that keeps this struggle from visiblizing

  14. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi wrote it (conviviality) into his epistemology. All knowledge is rooted in “tacit coefficients.” Tacit coefficients of knowledge are communally held and nourished. Conviviality involves a real communication on the inarticulate level, and shared intellectual passion. Pure conviviality is the cultivation of good fellowship, especially in small groups, in joint activities. Language, culture, and understanding move forward in the context of conviviality. • Illich applies this concept of conviviality to the relationship of human dignity and society

  15. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • The progress of science and professionalism are convivial to technology – but not necessarily to humanity • Humanity needs conviviality to prosper – with out it social order decays because it becomes disconnected at root (deep) levels with human meaning and with the relationship of human meaning to social order and its possibilities • This is evidenced in biological and chemical order is which convivial order can be found • Conviviality is a dimension with which to critique a tool, technology or social development

  16. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • Latin: “with” “life” – that bubbling that has to do with irrigating life: water, blood- the oxygenization processes that allow life to flourish, thrive, emerge • Old idea of “gathered at table” – where conversation emerges that can solve issues, imagine a positive future, create something that irrigates human being. • Freedom to create a thriving world vs freedom to create a technologized world • Conviviality and pain are connected – when conviviality is sacrificed we are also distanced from human pain placed in technologized relationships to it. Thus pain can be a way of locating where it has been injured…

  17. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • The epoch of system has replaced the epoch of instrumentality The distance between the human and the tool is subsumed as the system configures them as a dyad: the system incorporates us and reconfigures us as its ideological body (a virtualized body), this concept, an idea which becomes systematized, absorbs us such that we can no longer step outside of our tools to ground ourselves in our own body and world: the perpetuation of disembodiment as virtual metaphor Distances us from our capacity to comprehend misery and the problem of human dignity – it is this comprehension that saves us from our systems – pain works as a way to find “our body” (however pain is technologized by the system in several ways – especially as an image)

  18. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • Latin: “with” “life” – that bubbling that has to do with irrigating life: • The epoch of system has replaced the epoch of instrumentality The means of learning has been increasingly professionalized: profession as a “the call” to say – to be what one could be – each human has a certain dignity that surround work – as a creative and passionate contribution to social order Separation of this dignity from school as school becomes a means to create system which subsumes human usefulness in to human as tool used by this system

  19. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • The epoch of system has replaced the epoch of instrumentality Instead of receiving human as convivial “gift” - the human is re-ordered through education to fit the technology the system creates. This becomes expoentialized: as profession requires training, thus certificates become required for work, and education becomes intrinsically consumed by an order that is less and less available to all: and also is increasingly frayed by it passage through the system in its usefulness: examples: health care, child care The propensity of capitalism is to turn education – into a means of profiteering – that in order to “work” one must have certain degrees and certificates – means that even education itself becomes less about learning and more about “giving degrees and certificates” Education becomes disordered in relationship to its purpose – in relationship to human conviviality

  20. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • The epoch of system has replaced conviviality as a relationship between humans and tools in which creativity, involvement, passion, conversation, collaboration, are available as the conditions for creating society • The replacement is marked by a certain lone-ness that marks this age – a way in which priorities seem appointed afoot and afar from what people seem to really identify as priorities • In particular “loneliness” itself is visible – but instead of receiving convivial resolutions – is technologized as resolvable through technologies – and thus made amenable especially to solutions that position consumption over community – substituting it in for conviviality.

  21. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) • Illich’s concept of Conviviality: • The epoch of system has replaced conviviality as a relationship between humans and tools in which creativity, involvement, passion, conversation, collaboration, are available as the conditions for creating society • In particular “loneliness” itself is visible – but instead of receiving convivial resolutions – is technologized as resolvable through technologies – and thus made amenable especially to solutions that position consumption over community – substituting it in for conviviality. • In terms of governments: the image of conviviality becomes very important to affiliate with – conviviality becomes an image to manipulate and promise while actual conviviality becomes more ephemeral, promised but not actualized

  22. Langdon Winner • Current scholar: Langdon Winner is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York since 1990.

  23. Langdon Winner • In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power.[2] To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way “transcends the simple categories of ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ altogether, representing “instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others” (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999) as summarized by Winner in Wikipedia

  24. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “Let's take the bank teller, the person sitting behind the counter with little scraps of paper and an adding machine and replace it with an ATM accessible 24 hours a day. Let's take analog recording and the vinyl LP and replace it with the compact disc in which music is encoded as a stream of digital bits. Or let's take the classroom with the teacher, blackboard, books, and verbal interchange and replace it with materials presented in computer hardware and software and call it "interactive learning". From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  25. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means that many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression. As new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relations that surrounds them are often much different from what existed previously. This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully comprehends.". From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  26. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means that many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression. As new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relations that surrounds them are often much different from what existed previously. This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully comprehends.". From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  27. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “a widely popular ideology that dominates much of today's discussion on networked computing. A suitable name for this philosophy is cyberlibertarianism, a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics in the years to come.” From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  28. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • What is Cyberlibetarianism?

  29. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • What is Cyberibertarianism? • Libertarianism makes freedom a priority image no matter what • Freedom is a mythology that is used by libertarians • Freedom as relationship of choices to reality often remains unexamined: Who is free? What is free? What is free to grow remain relatively unprobed • For most libertarians – it is capitalism that is free to grow That this comes at the expense of other freedoms is often under acknowledged Cyberibertarianism: cyber should be free to grow no matter what: Winner argues that libertarianism is already a myth – but when paired with cyber becomes an especially powerful and unstoppable phenomena (even this idea of unstoppable is mythologized – we are portrayed as powerless in terms of its progress)

  30. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “The first and most central characteristic of cyberlibertarian world view is what amounts to a whole hearted embrace of technological determinism. This is not the generalized determinism of earlier writings on technology and culture, but one specifically tailored to the arrival of the electronic technologies of the late twentieth century. In harmony with the earlier determinist theories, however, the cyberlibertarians hold that we are driven by necessities that emerge from the development of the new technology and from nowhere else. • One familiar expression is Alvin Toffler's openly determinist wave theory of history. ” • From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  31. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • Influenced by Ellul and Illich, Winner argues that such determinism must be met by a more through version of this determinism – • My translation : Winner seems to argue that it must be shown to be really a version of technological optimism in disguise

  32. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “In this perspective, the dynamism of digital technology is our true destiny. There is no time to pause, reflect or ask for more influence in shaping these developments. Enormous feats of quick adaptation are required of all of us just to respond to the requirements the new technology casts upon us each day. In the writings of cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the challenge are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust.” From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  33. Langdon Winner: the presence of technology through artifact • “In fact, increasingly popular among cyberlibertarians is the conclusion that rapid development of artificial things amounts to a kind of evolution that can be explained in quasi-biological terms. As Kevin Kelly explains in his book Out of Control "We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution, perpetual novelty, and an agenda out of our control. Even without the control we must surrender, a neo-biological technology is far more rewarding than a world of clocks, gears, and predictable simplicity." (Kelly, 472) In Kelly's view, the effort to engage in deliberative social choice about technology can only be a destructive practice.” • From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY

  34. Next week: • Finish Langdon Winner • Lev Manovich • Donna Haraway • Lynn Spigel

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