Who will we be in cyberspace
Who will we be in cyberspace?
Langdon Winner
[Adapted from an address given to the Conference on Society and the Future of Computing in Durango, Colorado, June 1995. A longer version will be published in The Information Society's special issue about the conference (volume 12, number 1).]
Viewed at a distance, Americans must sometimes seem compulsively restless as we continually reinvent ourselves. The propensity to personal and social reinvention goes back to our earliest days. The colonists' successful war against King George III was also a revolution in political culture, one that overthrew monarchy as a tightly woven fabric of human relations.
The leaders of the uprising, the founding fathers, built political, legal, and economic institutions based on models adapted from the ancient republics. Individual liberty and
consent of the governed were now the guiding principles, but political institutions were to depend upon the guidance of a small group of enlightened, virtuous men. It did not take long for this republican conception to itself be challenged by rules, roles and relations far more democratic in character. By the early nineteenth century, Americans were busily affirming that the promise of the country was for the mass of common working people to achieve material prosperity and genuine self-government (Wood).
In sum, a lifetime that stretched from 1750 to 1820 would have undergone three radically different ways of defining who a person was in the larger order of things. Times of rapid transformation, then, are not new to us. Today's zealots for the information age and cyberspace often insist that we are confronted with totally unprecedented circumstances that require rapid transformation of society. Perhaps so, but we Americans are past masters in reinventing ourselves and sometimes proceed
thoughtfully to good effect.
Since the middle nineteenth century, episodes of social transformation have focused as much upon people's relationship to technological systems as they have to political institutions. To invent a new technology requires society to invent the kinds of people who will use it, with new practices, relationships and identities supplanting the old. We who care about the future of society, therefore, need to go beyond questions about the utility of new devices and systems, beyond even questions about economic consequences. One must also ask:
1. Around these instruments, what kinds of bonds, attachments and obligations are in the making?
2. To whom or to what are people connected or dependent upon?
3. Do ordinary people see themselves as having a crucial role in what is taking shape?
4. Do people see themselves as competent to make decisions?
5. Do they feel that their voices matter in making decisions that will affect family, workplace, community, nation?
These issues about selfhood and civic culture should always be addressed as technological innovations emerge. If we limit our attention to their uses and market prospects, we ignore their most consequential feature, the conditions that affect people's
sense of identity and community.
These questions arise forcefully with the digital transformation of a wide range of material artifacts interwoven with social practices. People are saying in effect: Let us take what exists now -- bank tellers, music recordings, teachers -- and restructure or replace it in digital format. Many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression and
opening the way for new patterns to solidify. This is vast, ongoing experiment whose ramifications no one fully comprehends.
The process has generated waves of enthusiasm from entrepreneurs, organizational innovators, artists, and others. The old bromides of Alvin Toffler's simplistic wave theory of history, almost forgotten until recently, have been revived by the right wing
manifesto, "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age". (Dyson, et al) Such millennial expectations, often arise during times of technological and social change, and they are accompanied by all kinds of "mythinformation" -- for example the assumption that information machines is somehow
inherently democratic (Winner, 1986).
Along with the excitement come misgivings. Digital liquification is also liquifying economic structures, educational institutions, and communities. Whole vocations -- secretaries, phone operators, bank tellers, postal clerks -- have been abolished or drastically reduced. The level of real wages for much of the population has declined -- including the wages of technical professionals (Bell) as firms lay off high salaried managers and technical staff and hire younger, cheaper workers right out of college. Informated knowledge bases permit firms to experiment with audacious programs in restructuring and reengineering.
Business gurus -- Tom Peters, Daniel Burrus, Michael Hammar, James Champy, and the like -- prefer to see these upheavals as an exhilarating challenge. Thus, Peters advises people in the throes of career change to embrace "perpetual adolescence" (Peters, 301). Other observers describe these developments as potentially a disastrous "end of work" and "end of career" for much of the population (Bridges, Rifkin, Glassner). Whatever
the case, basic conditions of human identity and association are being redefined. Who will we become as such developments run their course? What kind of society and political order will emerge?
Perhaps we should consider historical chapters in which technological transformation involved profound alterations and momentous choices for self and society. Several recent studies have explored what is distinctive about human selfhood in modern,
industrial society. Diverse scholars -- David Hounshell, Terry Smith, Jeffrey Meikel, David Noble, Adrian Forty, Ruth Schwarz Cowan, Dolores Hayden, Roland Marchand, David Nye, David Harvey, and others -- have looked at the first half of twentieth century
America, noticing such developments as the Ford assembly line, scientific management, and infrastructures for electricity, water, transit, telephone, radio, and television, and asking how they achieved the form they did, how the populace received them, how the consumer economy came to be equated with the good life, and how advertising, industrial design, public relations, and education helped shape public opinion and channel social
development.
These authors have found that power to decide how technologies were introduced was far from evenly distributed. Those who had the wherewithal to implement new technologies often molded society to match the needs of emerging technologies and organizations.
Social control was most overt in workplaces, where employees were often seen as malleable, subject to the routines and disciplines of work. This attitude was clearly displayed in the paternalism of F.W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. "In the past the man has been first"; Taylor explained, "in the future the system must be first" (Taylor, 7). As the industrial workplaces were organized, people were mobilized not only for productive tasks, but for fairly stable, predictable, reproducible identities as well. Virtues appropriate to the development of machines -- productive order, efficiency, control, forward looking dynamism -- became prevailing social virtues as well (Smith).
Industrial leaders like Henry Ford, Henry Luce and Alfred Sloan tried to mobilize people not merely as producers, as consumers as well. By the 1920s corporate planners offered images and slogans that depicted identities, attitudes and lifestyles that could guide people home life and leisure. Industrial design, advertising, and corporate sponsored journalism and public education combined with industrial planning to promote a series of social role identities in photos, newspaper and magazine articles, and school text books (Marchand). In Michael Schudson's apt summary, "Where buying replaced making, then looking replaced doing as a key social action, reading signs replaced following orders as a crucial modern skill" (Schudson, 156-157).
Historians Roland Marchand and Terry Smith note the widely displayed tableaux vivants of modern life, combinations of advertising text and photography that from the 1920s to 1950s depicted:
the executive in the office tower;
the worker in the clean, well-organized factory;
the housewife in her appliance filled kitchen;
children surrounded with goods for the little ones;
the automobile driver speeding along a wide open highway.
These images projected novel possibilities for living in modern society. They told a story in which people's orderly role in production was to be rewarded with an equally orderly role in consumption. Of course these efforts did not completely determine people's lives. But the experience of societies such as those of contemporary Europe where consumerism does not yet dominate understandings of self, family and society helps us appreciate the artificiality of these strategies of social control. The advertisements and tableaux vivants always depicted the future as something whole and inevitable. People were to be propelled forward by larger forces into a world that rational, dynamic, prosperous, and harmonious.
Those making choices about social priorities and investments had no desire to make the planning of sociotechnical innovations more inclusive. The broad umbrella of "progress" enabled economic and political elites to defuse public criticism. During the 1920s through the 1950s there were almost no popular forums in print or elsewhere in which the meaning of the new technologies and their consequences could be discussed, criticized, or debated.
The ultimate promise of modern society was held to be individual, material satisfaction. Missing from the picture was any attention to collective goods and problems. Thus, buying and driving this automobile would give the driver and family members
a sense of thrill and belonging. The automobile was always shown on highways miraculously free of other vehicles, well-paved roads that seemed to extend infinitely. As a 1930s ad for ethyl gasoline proclaimed: "There's always room out front" (Marchand,
362).
Another key finding concerns the design of artifacts. Looking at the novelties that bombarded them, everyday folks were apt to find the transformations complex and confusing. Design thus often concealed the complexity of devices, systems and social
arrangements, making them appear simple and manageable – thereby rendering them less intelligible. In advertising as well, extremely simple solutions were proposed for complicated, real world problems. Eventually some of those problems -- congestion,
pollution, urban and environmental decay -- emerged as difficult issues, made even more vexing by having been ignored for decades.
As we ponder horizons of computing and society today, it seems likely that American society will reproduce some of the basic tendencies of modernism.
-- unequal power over key decisions about what is built and why;
-- concerted attempts to enframe and direct people's lives in both work and consumption;
-- the presentation of the future society as something
nonnegotiable;
-- the stress on individual gratification rather than collective problems and responsibilities;
-- design strategies that conceal and obfuscate important realms of social complexity.
Such patterns kind persist because the institutions of planning, finance, management, advertising, education, and design that originally shaped modernity are still powerful. Occasional calls for resistance and reform have mostly been neutralized or absorbed: the push for ecological limits is repackaged as "Green consumerism" and demands for participation in workplace decisions rechanneled to become "empowerment" through the use of personal computers. Possibilities for self-conscious social choice and deliberate social action are often sidetracked to become obsessions with the purchasing and possessing of commodities.
It is doubtful, however, that today's information systems will simply reproduce the terms of previous decades. Many of the "modern" forms of selfhood and social organization seem ill-suited for conditions that increasingly confront Americans in
the workplace and elsewhere. For example, the focus of personal identity upon holding an job seems a relic of the industrial past (Glassner). Much blue collar and clerical work is now temporary. Even well educated technical professionals must now define themselves as contractors able to move from project to project among many organizations. The assumption in computer-centered enterprises is no longer that of belonging to any enduring framework of social relations. How people will recreate selfhood when everyone is expendable, could become a more serious issue than even the decline of real wages.
Another crisis concerns where and how people will experience membership. For modernism the prescribed frame for social relations was that of city and suburb. But today, for significant parts of society, attachment is no longer defined geographically at all. Many activities of work and leisure take place in global, electronic settings. The symbolic analysts of today's global webs of enterprise are shedding traditional loyalties, leaving everyone else to suffer in decaying cities (Reich). Such attitudes are found in 1990s cyberlibertarianism as represented, for example, in "Cyberspace and the American
Dream" and in much of the hyperventilated prose of Wired magazine. These authors fiercely desire market freedom and unfettered self-expression with no sense of owing anything to geographically situated others. Valued now are protean flexibility, restless entrepreneurialism and a willingness to dissolve social bonds in the pursuit of material gain. Of course, this breast-thumping individualism conceals many social conflicts. Many of those enthralled with globalization as the wellspring of economic vitality also bemoan "the weakened family", "collapse of community", and "chaos of the inner cities", failing to notice any connection.
Many, of course, expect that people will use the Internet to forge new social relationships and identities, including ones that might bolster local community life. But right now it's anyone's guess what sorts of personalities, styles of discourse,
and social norms will ultimately flourish in these new settings.
Will digital media sustain healthy attachments to persons both near and far away? Or will distance foster insouciance, resentment and mutual contempt? Mid-1990s Internet news groups, for example, certainly do not resemble the kinds of interpersonal respect, civility and friendship that traditional, geographically based communities require (Winner, 1995).
We can predict, though, that American society will continue to exclude ordinary citizens from key choices about the design and development of new technologies, including information systems. Industrial leaders present as faits accomplis what otherwise
might have been choices open for diverse public imaginings, investigations and debates. In magazine cover stories, corporate advertising campaigns and political speeches, announcements of the arrival of the Information Superhighway and similar metaphors
are still pitched in the language of inevitability. Here it comes: the set-top box!
People doing research on computing and the future could have a positive influence in these matters. If we're asking people to change their lives to adapt to new information systems, it seems responsible to solicit broad participation in deliberation, planning, decisionmaking, prototyping, testing, evaluation and the like. Some of the best models, in my view, come from the Scandinavian social democracies where social and political
circumstances make consultation with ordinary workers and citizens a much more common practice than it is in the United States (Sandberg et al). Such models have been seldom tried in the United States.
Yet even the modest forms of citizen response found in the tightly controlled contexts of market testing are revealing. The American public never warmed to the enormous push for HDTV in the 1980s, for example. More recently, companies hyping interactive
TV have found that "consumers yawned in the face of its most hotly promoted applications -- movies-on-demand and interactive home shopping" (Caruso). What seems to excite people -- as socially concerned computer professionals have long anticipated -- are open architecture networks of many-to-many communication
in which people can produce information products with a distinctive personal stamp. Corporate designers have gone back to the drawing boards, setting aside the push for set-top boxes, and are now perfecting cable modems (Caruso).
Yet many leaders in the computing and telecommunications industry still seem intent on enforcing corporate closure on information systems, capturing those markets, and placing their distinctive brand on people's lives. As Caruso observes: "the telephone companies..., preparing [their own] networks and services, agree that fiber co-ax is the right design". How reassuring; evidently the "right design" is headed our way and again we have not had to lift a finger.
But why should we settle for effrontery so blatant? Research developments in computing ought to involve the public in activities of inquiry, exploration, dialogue, and debate. Here computer professionals could exercise much-needed leadership.
We can pretend to follow "where the technology is taking us", to social outcomes "determined by market forces", but the fact is that deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology are made by someone, somehow, every
day. Professionals with insight into the choices that matter must express their knowledge and judgments to a broad public. Otherwise they may find themselves employed as mere ranch hands, helping fit the citizenry with digital brass rings.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is evident that, for better or worse, the future of computing and the future of human relations -- indeed, of human being itself -- are now thoroughly intertwined. We need to seek alternatives, social policies that might undo the dreary legacy of modernism: pervasive systems of one-way communication, preemption of democratic social choice corporate manipulation, and the presentation of sweeping changes in living conditions as something justified by a univocal, irresistible "progress". True, the habits of technological somnambulism cultivated over many decades will not be easily overcome. But as waves of over-hyped innovation confront increasingly obvious signs of social disorder, opportunities for lively conversation sometimes fall into our laps. Choices about computer technology involve not only obvious questions about "what to do", but also less obvious ones about "who to be". By virtue of their vocation, computer professionals are well-situated to initiate public debates on this matter, helping a democratic populace explore new identities and the horizons of a good society.
References
Trudy E. Bell, Surviving in the Reengineered Corporate Environment: the Freelance Engineer, IEEE Power Engineering Review, May 1995, pages 7-11.
William Bridges, Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Denise Caruso, Digital commerce: On-line browsing got you down? Don't get mad, get cable, The New York Times, 5 June 1995, page D3.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Basic Books, 1983.
Esther Dyson et al, Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, Release 1.2, Washington: Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 22, 1994.
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire, Pantheon Books, 1986.
Barry Glassner, Career Crash: America's New Crisis and Who Survives, Simon & Schuster, 1994.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, 1989.
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, MIT Press, 1981.
David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 925-1939, Temple University Press, 1979.
David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Knopf, 1977.
David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology,1880-1940, MIT Press, 1990.
Tom Peters, The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person's Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times, Vintage Books, 1994.
Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism, Knopf, 1991.
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1995.
Ake Sandberg, et al., Technological Change and Co-Determination in Sweden, Temple Univ. Press, 1992.
Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, Basic Books, 1984.
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry Art and Design in America, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Brothers, 1911.
Langdon Winner, "Mythinformation," in The Whale and the Reactor, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Langdon Winner, Privileged communications, Technology Review, March/April 1995.
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Knopf, 1992.\
Department of Science and Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
langdon_winner@mts.rpi.edu
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