Wired

"Every journal is like a wire carrying a psychological current which winds its way intricately across and through the country, and it is continually crossed and recrossed by thousands of other wires."

R. A. Scott-James, The Influence of the Press.  London: 1913.

Scott-James was describing the news network of journals and newspapers that spread across the country, which was feeding a voracious reading public.  The use of wires as a trope to describe the connectedness of society seems to be gaining ground.  Not surprising since Britain's towns and country roads were very quickly covered with overhead wires that darkened the skies.  The difference between the 'before' and 'after' scenes would have been very stark.

More to the point, the network of communications is anthropomorphised.  Wires or cables are the nerves of the city, carrying electrical impulses with messages, impressions, emotions.  If a person's central nervous system is damaged, he will be reduced to a vegetable state.  If a city's network of wires comes down, the city is crippled and everything comes to a halt.  Tens of thousands of Brooklyn residents found this out the hard way in 1975 when a fire in a New York telephone exchange burned their connections.  The chaos in telephone service was second only to that caused by the 9/11 attack.

As a visual device, wires dominate in Nevinson's Amongst the nerves of the world, painted in 1930.  Telephone wires dissect the air above Fleet Street into angular blocks, St Paul's is visible in the background.  I like the dichotomy inherent in the wires: they connect and unite people and places, yet at the same time cut and separate the scene into smaller, disparate sections.  A truly modern element, this ambiguous 'same, but different.'  The painting shows not only the nerves of the urban body, but also all the other flows of communications: lines of buses and cars running up and down Fleet Street, flanked by streams of pedestrians.  The painting is exhibited by the Museum of London, together with other works by Nevinson.  Enjoy!

Freud and technology - but without psychoanalysis

Freud considers the progress made in science and technology.  Although people should be proud of their achievements, this progress has not made people feel happier.  Human happiness depends on more than just man’s domination of nature and technological progress.  Having said this, there is some pleasure to be derived 

“if I can […] hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed.”   

Add to this the more significant advances in medicine that save lives.

Freud counters this, however, with a pessimistic reply.   

“If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him.”   

And medicine saves lives only for people to endure miserable lives.  A bleak outlook.

Without wishing to be a wet blanket, these sentiments could well apply to today’s generation (or any generation, come to think of it).  Does possessing the latest iPhone or laptop count for happiness today?  Freud’s examples strike me as a case of ‘using technology to solve a technological problem.’  Technology takes my child away and I’ll use technology to overcome that obstacle.

Sigmund Freud.  Civilization and its Discontents.  New York: Norton, 1961. Original, Vienna, 1930.

Technology - consumption - culture

Telephone (as one example of a communications technology) is an artefact.

Artefacts can be used to construct our identity.

Telephone is ambivalent, double-sided since it

1. isolates us [we communicate without needing to be physically present]
2. connects us [we communicate with others where it would be impossible for us to be physically present]

Technology is no longer associated with the idea of human progress (first promoted during the Enlightenment).  Technology has not been the panacea we imagined it to be (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, global warming, pollution, etc.)

The effects that a tech has are not built into it; the effects of a tech are determined by how it is consumed and consumption needs a context.

The home as a context for consumption of tech

* The home has gone from being a unit of production to a unit of consumption (unless you are a woman, in which case it is both).

* More leisure time is spent at home.

* Home has become self-sufficient, self-contained - a process of privatization has occurred

* More emphasis on consumption, less on public sphere/community

* Again, the ambivalence of techs that bring us closer together but also isolate us from each other.

Definition of "technology"

Techs are made up of three components:

1. Physical artefact
2. Surrounding human activity - necessary, otherwise artefact on its own is useless
3. Human knowledge (know-how) - applied to the design, maintenance, etc.

In other words, tech is a social phenomenon.

Technology can be:

1. a physical artefact; or
2. a technique, a way of doing something (with or without artefacts)

Technological Determinism

The prevailing technology determines our culture, e.g. steam to power factories during steam age determines dominant form of social organisation (cotton mills, urban slums, etc.)

This theory believes that tech develops outside of society with a life of its own, and then have an impact on society [as if society were a passive recipient].

Although tech. determinism as a theory has its flaws and is now overlooked by academics, it still has a persistent hold over us.  We still talk as if we were powerless beings at the mercy of our machines, e.g. how the Internet is affecting our children, how mobile phones change the way we communicate, etc.  Note how the technology has become the subject of the sentence and we are the objects upon which the verb is acted out.

Question - why do we insist on talking about technologies that do things to us, or affect us in a certain way?   Why do we not talk about the things we do with technologies or how we use them?  Why do we put ourselves in the position of passive receptor or 'victim' of technology?  Is it because we want to absolve ourselves of all responsibility for when things go wrong, or when negative side-effects appear?  If there is a problem with a company delivery, then we are told the computer is down or such like.  You never hear the excuse 'sorry, the computer programmer didn't foresee this problem and thus programmed the computer incompetently.'

Social Shaping of Technology

This theory concentrates on

• Actors (engineers, managers, scientists, consumers); and
• Networks in which the actors operate

Techs embody the culture that produced them.  Culture shapes technology.

BUT techs do have their limitations - they limit what is possible; design of a tech is limited by the nature of the materials used.

Technology as text

Like any other text, technology can be

• encoded - physically (in its design) and symbolically (styling, marketing)
• decoded - read by customers

Note that production and consumption of technologies must be considered together and symmetrically.

Preferred readings are encoded in technologies during their design (adverts, news stories, etc.)  A 'reader' is directed towards this particular reading but there are of course alternative readings.  Decoding is also shaped by the reader's own cultural framework and the reading thus generated may be at odds with the preferred reading envisioned by the technology's creators.  There is some degree of resistance and transformation on the part of the reader but we should not read too much into the power of this resistance (apologies for the pun!)

Aberrant or oppositional decodings

There are occasions for alternative uses for technologies, uses unimagined or unplanned by its producers (e.g. fax machine used by students to contact outsiders during Tiannamen Square incident).

New techs are cumulative

New techs have to fit into the context of existing techs.

The telephone

First uses of the telephone - broadcasting of: church services; concerts; political rallies, sporting events; news.  Telephone was thought appropriate only for businesses and household management.  Telephone companies took a long time to realise that encouraging subscribers to gossip would be good for profits. [see also Fischer, Touch Someone, 56]

Meanings of technology change

As a technology becomes more commonplace among the population, its meaning shifts.  This symbolic meaning is also shaped by culture.  Example - mobile phone in the beginning was only for elite businessmen, a marker of success.  Now it's used by everybody (school kids, plumbers, etc.)  It has lost its exclusivity.  To be marked out as an 'elite' mobile owner, you now have to be inaccessible.  

Hugh Mackay, ed. Consumption and Everyday Life.  London: Sage, 1997.