Thursday, July 31, 2003
ESRC project on social issues in nanotechnology
Up a level at http://www.esrc.ac.uk/esrccontent/indexpub.asp you'll find lots of good material on social change and even some futures studies.
Up a level at http://www.esrc.ac.uk/esrccontent/indexpub.asp you'll find lots of good material on social change and even some futures studies.
Monday, July 28, 2003
FILESHARING Wars
Music-Sharing Subpoenas Targets Parents (TechNews.com)http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38406-2003Jul24.html
THE war against p2p filesharing of copyrightes naterial gathers pace as individuals are targeted.
MEANWHILE lovers of the classic West Coast should check out the perfectly legal downloads of concerts by Airplane, Dead, Tuna, Garcia et al at:
http://www.sugarmegs.org/
Note you can download files to hard disc in realplayer format.
Music-Sharing Subpoenas Targets Parents (TechNews.com)http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38406-2003Jul24.html
THE war against p2p filesharing of copyrightes naterial gathers pace as individuals are targeted.
MEANWHILE lovers of the classic West Coast should check out the perfectly legal downloads of concerts by Airplane, Dead, Tuna, Garcia et al at:
http://www.sugarmegs.org/
Note you can download files to hard disc in realplayer format.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
CORRESPONDENCE WITH A JOURNALIST
His draft in sections marked >, mine in the rest, italicised
From: Ian Miles
Date sent: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:45:46 +0100
> When it comes to the sustainable development debate, there are many
> who argue that changes in our everyday behaviour are the key to
> ensuring a better environmental, economic and social future.
> Cut waste, we're told. Use less energy. Drive less. Take the bus. Join
> a community group, take more exercise, get involved.
(Some of the analysts of sustainability issues are of the view that
without radical lifestyle changes we will simply waste away all
technological gains - e.g. use the resources more so the overall
impact is the same. "Boomerang effect" I don't think the case is
proven but (a) it does need to be taken seriously as a possibility -
one that needs proper research to answer when, where, why it
happens; and (b) to my mind there's something fundamentally
wrong with a society where people are happy to litter, throw away
perfectly usable devices, etc. on the assumption that "someone" will
clear them up (or else that it just doesnt matter). So please try not
to stoke complacency (can complacency be stoked??)
Additionally, technologies could help people be more aware of the
enviro and econo costs of their activities. Eg smart meters that
explain just how you're using electricity and even suggest ways of
conserving it.
> But arguably this is only one part of the solution. One crucial
> question to ask is this: can major leaps in scientific discovery or in
> technological development make a difference, too?
Major leaps - we can differentiate between incremental innovations
(minor changes) radical ones (new ways of doing things, based on
quite new technical knowledge) and revolutionary ones 9where the
knowledge is so fundamental it can be applied across a hige range
of social and economic activities). Of the latter, we could see
steam and electric power as examples, IT more recently, beginning
to realise just how pervasive biotech is, and nano is just beginning
to pop its head up.
My view is that the IT revolution still has a long way to go - even
were we to somehow stop people developing more powerful chips,
etc., there would be decades of new things that could be done with
what we have. Despite the dotcome bubble, the opportunities
offered by networking computer power are immense. (There ae
people at lancaster working on one version of this - ubiquitous
computing - the idea is that communicating chips will be so cheap
that they will be capable of being put just about anywhere, to monitor
or even control many things. The current scare about RF chips in
Tesco is just the early step here. Imagine having little sensors all
over the place - e.g. in parks...) Bio and nano are newer, and thus
more unpredictable still. They have applications well beyond the
narrow health/food and materials areas. For example, new energy
systems might be based on nano materials that mimic biological
systems capturing of solar power (or of polllutants)... GMO crops
that provide fuels... new materials that act as much better solar cells,
fuel cells, refrigerants, superconductors,etc. Remediation may be
achieved by GMOs, small robots, etc.
There will continue to be incremental innovations based on
established technologies (thus windmills get bigger and bigger).
We will see the revolutionary technologies applied within trad ones
(IT controlled windmills are old hat - consumer owned solar panels
feeding back into the mains have been discussed for ages). As the
revolutionary technologies generate products that get top be
familiar, there will continue to be invremental innovation in these
products - e.g. continual software upgrades, better mobile phones,
grr. (Some of these foster throw-away society tendencies, so
should design for recycling/reuse)>
> Will energy be hydrogen based, fuelling cars and homes and businesses
> whose only exhaust fume is hot water vapour? Will we take recycling to
> another level and close the loop of resource use, making new products
> from old, creating a zero waste system?
I bet we soon have dire warnings about water (steam) pollution!
Could we have roadside "trees" that soak up pollutants (water or
whatever)?
>
> On social issues, will we uncover new ways of creating safer
> communities?
Surveillance, personal alarms (with instant location detection), etc
are a simple if inefficient tech fix (and one that feeds the sense of
insecurity). There's also a lot that can be done with urban design
etc - but the crucial issues are matters for social innovation and of
course good old methods like meaningful jobs, decent social
facilities...
Will new technologies bring more learning and more
> services to more people?
Yes, and more licentiousness and lowest common denominator
crud, unless we can eduate critical faculties.
>Will medical advances mean longer, more
> satisfying lives?
Life extension anti-ageing etc. must be on the way. How will
societies deal with this? Definitely need antiageing to avoid punitive
health bills for infirm...
More satisfying is a bigger issue. Psychometric measures of
satissfaction (not very good) show only very slow increases in this
with increased affluence and overall health, in part because
apsirations increase, probably in part because our personal lives
and social relations probably dont improve commensurately.
Technolgy inputs could include lifestyle drugs, interventions based
on understanding genetic and neuropsychological dimensions of
cognition, biofeedback (nice that this is coming back - piece on
radio today about theta wave {I guess, wasnt liistening at the crucial
moment] boosting for pianists. Biofeedback offered great
opportunities for dealing with a range of health and related issues,
so its lack of take-off always intrigued me.) new ways of adding
value to participatory sports, exercise, etc.>
> And importantly are there risks associated with scientific
> advancement? Should we be more readily applying the precautionary
> principle to the future development of science and technology?
Very hard to apply, since the long-term implications of innovations
are hard tpo assess, and since innovations are themselves on the
move (with incremental and radical change a fact of life). need early
warning systems of various kinds - to anticipate problems (there has
been a tendency to be very naive about the way in which almost all
innovations get used for purposes other than their creators
intended) and to pick them up at early stages. This requires much
more systematic effort than is currently applied - some sort of risk-
oriented Foresight.
Its undeniable that as we get ever more fundamental knowledge
and poerful techniques, our power to shape the world for good or ill
increases. While some technologies require such resources to
control them that its mainly their use by military, corporations etc that
gives rise to concern, we see that some others are very amenable
to small-scale seizure. Aircraft in 911, little bits of computer code
by viurus makers and spammers.. and in the near future control of
genetic material (I recall reading that gene splicing was already on
the lab curriculum of a US high school... dont quote me on this).
There are real problems here - recall the accidental discovery that
playing with mousepox rendered it much more virulent. If some
simple way of modifying say E Coli to carry killer properties was in
the public domain, we would be likely to see kids and cults able to
replicvate this in, say, 10 years. I'm going on a bit here, but there
are real dangers, and it took 911 to start to wake up the security and
risk communities to some of these possibilities.
On the other hand, I see the benefits of further knowledge to be so
immense, and commercially attractive, that the case for further
developing the new technologies is overwhelming. So I guess the
thing to do is to stress that we need to think serioiusly about ways of
anticipating threats as well as talking up these real opportunities.
Eventually we may have to put up with substantial changes in our
assumptions about privacy, etc. in order to deal with the worse
threats - and I say this with hesitation, thinking about the crass things
going on now with TIA and the like.
The important thing will be to have dialogues where those working at
the scientific frontier can relate with people more used to thinking
about social issues and unintended consequences. Free of the
sort of panic there's been about GM foods and "health hazards".
His draft in sections marked >, mine in the rest, italicised
From: Ian Miles
Date sent: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:45:46 +0100
> When it comes to the sustainable development debate, there are many
> who argue that changes in our everyday behaviour are the key to
> ensuring a better environmental, economic and social future.
> Cut waste, we're told. Use less energy. Drive less. Take the bus. Join
> a community group, take more exercise, get involved.
(Some of the analysts of sustainability issues are of the view that
without radical lifestyle changes we will simply waste away all
technological gains - e.g. use the resources more so the overall
impact is the same. "Boomerang effect" I don't think the case is
proven but (a) it does need to be taken seriously as a possibility -
one that needs proper research to answer when, where, why it
happens; and (b) to my mind there's something fundamentally
wrong with a society where people are happy to litter, throw away
perfectly usable devices, etc. on the assumption that "someone" will
clear them up (or else that it just doesnt matter). So please try not
to stoke complacency (can complacency be stoked??)
Additionally, technologies could help people be more aware of the
enviro and econo costs of their activities. Eg smart meters that
explain just how you're using electricity and even suggest ways of
conserving it.
> But arguably this is only one part of the solution. One crucial
> question to ask is this: can major leaps in scientific discovery or in
> technological development make a difference, too?
Major leaps - we can differentiate between incremental innovations
(minor changes) radical ones (new ways of doing things, based on
quite new technical knowledge) and revolutionary ones 9where the
knowledge is so fundamental it can be applied across a hige range
of social and economic activities). Of the latter, we could see
steam and electric power as examples, IT more recently, beginning
to realise just how pervasive biotech is, and nano is just beginning
to pop its head up.
My view is that the IT revolution still has a long way to go - even
were we to somehow stop people developing more powerful chips,
etc., there would be decades of new things that could be done with
what we have. Despite the dotcome bubble, the opportunities
offered by networking computer power are immense. (There ae
people at lancaster working on one version of this - ubiquitous
computing - the idea is that communicating chips will be so cheap
that they will be capable of being put just about anywhere, to monitor
or even control many things. The current scare about RF chips in
Tesco is just the early step here. Imagine having little sensors all
over the place - e.g. in parks...) Bio and nano are newer, and thus
more unpredictable still. They have applications well beyond the
narrow health/food and materials areas. For example, new energy
systems might be based on nano materials that mimic biological
systems capturing of solar power (or of polllutants)... GMO crops
that provide fuels... new materials that act as much better solar cells,
fuel cells, refrigerants, superconductors,etc. Remediation may be
achieved by GMOs, small robots, etc.
There will continue to be incremental innovations based on
established technologies (thus windmills get bigger and bigger).
We will see the revolutionary technologies applied within trad ones
(IT controlled windmills are old hat - consumer owned solar panels
feeding back into the mains have been discussed for ages). As the
revolutionary technologies generate products that get top be
familiar, there will continue to be invremental innovation in these
products - e.g. continual software upgrades, better mobile phones,
grr. (Some of these foster throw-away society tendencies, so
should design for recycling/reuse)>
> Will energy be hydrogen based, fuelling cars and homes and businesses
> whose only exhaust fume is hot water vapour? Will we take recycling to
> another level and close the loop of resource use, making new products
> from old, creating a zero waste system?
I bet we soon have dire warnings about water (steam) pollution!
Could we have roadside "trees" that soak up pollutants (water or
whatever)?
>
> On social issues, will we uncover new ways of creating safer
> communities?
Surveillance, personal alarms (with instant location detection), etc
are a simple if inefficient tech fix (and one that feeds the sense of
insecurity). There's also a lot that can be done with urban design
etc - but the crucial issues are matters for social innovation and of
course good old methods like meaningful jobs, decent social
facilities...
Will new technologies bring more learning and more
> services to more people?
Yes, and more licentiousness and lowest common denominator
crud, unless we can eduate critical faculties.
>Will medical advances mean longer, more
> satisfying lives?
Life extension anti-ageing etc. must be on the way. How will
societies deal with this? Definitely need antiageing to avoid punitive
health bills for infirm...
More satisfying is a bigger issue. Psychometric measures of
satissfaction (not very good) show only very slow increases in this
with increased affluence and overall health, in part because
apsirations increase, probably in part because our personal lives
and social relations probably dont improve commensurately.
Technolgy inputs could include lifestyle drugs, interventions based
on understanding genetic and neuropsychological dimensions of
cognition, biofeedback (nice that this is coming back - piece on
radio today about theta wave {I guess, wasnt liistening at the crucial
moment] boosting for pianists. Biofeedback offered great
opportunities for dealing with a range of health and related issues,
so its lack of take-off always intrigued me.) new ways of adding
value to participatory sports, exercise, etc.>
> And importantly are there risks associated with scientific
> advancement? Should we be more readily applying the precautionary
> principle to the future development of science and technology?
Very hard to apply, since the long-term implications of innovations
are hard tpo assess, and since innovations are themselves on the
move (with incremental and radical change a fact of life). need early
warning systems of various kinds - to anticipate problems (there has
been a tendency to be very naive about the way in which almost all
innovations get used for purposes other than their creators
intended) and to pick them up at early stages. This requires much
more systematic effort than is currently applied - some sort of risk-
oriented Foresight.
Its undeniable that as we get ever more fundamental knowledge
and poerful techniques, our power to shape the world for good or ill
increases. While some technologies require such resources to
control them that its mainly their use by military, corporations etc that
gives rise to concern, we see that some others are very amenable
to small-scale seizure. Aircraft in 911, little bits of computer code
by viurus makers and spammers.. and in the near future control of
genetic material (I recall reading that gene splicing was already on
the lab curriculum of a US high school... dont quote me on this).
There are real problems here - recall the accidental discovery that
playing with mousepox rendered it much more virulent. If some
simple way of modifying say E Coli to carry killer properties was in
the public domain, we would be likely to see kids and cults able to
replicvate this in, say, 10 years. I'm going on a bit here, but there
are real dangers, and it took 911 to start to wake up the security and
risk communities to some of these possibilities.
On the other hand, I see the benefits of further knowledge to be so
immense, and commercially attractive, that the case for further
developing the new technologies is overwhelming. So I guess the
thing to do is to stress that we need to think serioiusly about ways of
anticipating threats as well as talking up these real opportunities.
Eventually we may have to put up with substantial changes in our
assumptions about privacy, etc. in order to deal with the worse
threats - and I say this with hesitation, thinking about the crass things
going on now with TIA and the like.
The important thing will be to have dialogues where those working at
the scientific frontier can relate with people more used to thinking
about social issues and unintended consequences. Free of the
sort of panic there's been about GM foods and "health hazards".
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
The European Monitoring Centre on Change (EMCC) is a place for exchanging practice, information and ideas on the management and anticipation of change.
emcc - european monitoring centre on change - home page
emcc - european monitoring centre on change - home page
A Note on Technological Determinism
Ian Miles
(These are notes taken from a paper i presented at a conference years back - 1989 to be precise) and never got round to writing up properly with footnotes etc.)
One of the most prominent themes in social science (especially sociological) writings on technology and society is the critique of technological determinism. In addition to intellectual reason for rejecting this viewpoint, technological determinism (TD) is seen as functioning as an ideology of the classic kind. TD is believed to inhibit social action by portraying technology as determinant of social change rather than the other way round. "You can't fight progress" is a slogan of the age - and what could be more progressive than technical progress? After all, will not the development of the productive forces burst asunder the obsolete social relations which currently fetter us?
The critique has been elaborated in numerous ways by social scientists of different persuasions - with much mutual recrimination. Many of those who have set out to criticise TD find themselves accused by yet other commentators (who regard themselves as even more incisive) as still falling into a TD
trap. To clarify the discussion, we can distinguish two aspects of TD. (These are seen as bound together in different ways by different critics.)
Technological Determinism 1: Technology As Asocial
This first form of technological determinism portrays technologies as being the way they are simply because that is the way the natural world is. Technologies are expressions of the laws of nature, in that the reason why they work is because they obey these laws - and the reason why magic does not work is because it pays them no regard. No-one would seek to deny the existence of technological change, of course, or the role of human agents in effecting this change. But human history is a story of technological progress, in which increasing insight into these natural laws is reflected in increasingly efficient and effective technologies.
More or less sophisticated versions of this TD perspective (we shall label it TD1) are highly influential, as revealed in everyday descriptions of heroic inventors as the "discoverers" of the calculus, the electric light bulb, nuclear power, or whatever. For TD1, it seems almost as if technologies are Platonic ideals, that they are "out there" in the way that America was awaiting Columbus.20 As the age of discovery led to the gradual filling-in of maps of the world, so technical change itself follows a more-or-less natural pattern. We come to understand nature better, our technical knowledge accumulates, and we experience technological progress. There is effectively a logic which takes us from partial to more complete knowledge, from elementary to more sophisticated technologies.
The broad course of technological development seems almost preordained in unsophisticated versions of TD1. In practice, social factors necessarily creep in. Just as Columbus might not have raised finance, or might have been following an entirely different hunch - or a different set of economic interests - so
technological development may be delayed, or distorted. Nobody can be unaware of the vast resources devoted to the development of military technology - indeed, a cursory look at the history of technology shows that this is by no means a twentieth century phenomenon. Although this is invariably overstated by the proponents and beneficiaries of these programmes, many significant developments actually have been "spin-offs" of military research and development. TD1 might recuperate this statement, of course, by citing it as evidence that even warped priorities cannot keep the technological truth from emerging!
This is not just a matter of military priorities. From the perspective of TD1, social structures of many kinds can delay and distort technological development. This brings us to the classic debates of political economy. For the right, a minimally-regulated market would allow the untrammelled expression of human needs and accumulation of knowledge: unfortunately, in contemporary societies, planning frequently interferes. Not only does planning distort social affairs, but it also hinders realisation of technological progress, by imposing faulty, bureaucratically-biassed, interests on innovative individuals.
For the (classic) left, in contrast, markets set people against each other, and prioritise needs according to financial clout; some form of democratic planning should offer the opportunity for formulating social needs more adequately, though in practice, most planning has been subservient to market or other vested interests.
From either perspective, it is an imperfect world; even if "you can't stop progress", you can delay it, usually at your own or your neighbour's cost. The broad course of technological development is liable to be slowed down, or perhaps warped and biassed in some details. But someone else is likely to forge
ahead anyway. There are striking similarities with the worldview of neoclassical economics, in both the left and (less surprisingly) the right-wing versions of TD1. A model of rational activity is set up (by deduction rather than from empirical analyses of economic and technological behaviour); it is then assumed that real-life activity basically represents a distortion of this ideal state of affairs. Normative
conclusions and policy prescriptions almost entirely consist of statements to the effect that the real world should be brought into closer synchrony with the model.
But is not the notion of a 'natural' course of technological change, from which there can be biasses or distortions, itself a form of TD? Discounting the very different attitudes to technology that exist among different societies, modern times are unique in the institutionalisation of Research and Development (R&D) to create new technologies in the service of commercial and military competition. But even so, particular social circumstances lead to actors developing interests in applying knowledge to particular ends. These circumstances include the specific technical capabilities and market structures within which R&D programmes are launched and implemented. Historical contingencies lead to what innovation researchers term "path-determined" technological development, as documented in studies
of firms and of major groups of technology. Small variations in empirical circumstances might have resulted in remarkably different configurations of technologies.
Thus this critique of TD12stresses that technology is social. The interests to which technological development is attuned; the types of resources which different actors can bring to bear on stimulating such technological development; and the views of science and society, and even of the nature and role of rationalities of various kinds, within which these activities take place; all of these are social products. Thus whether technological development simply expresses the dominant interests in society, or is some more complicated expression of heterogeneous social processes, becomes a key question. Equally
important is the matter of just what it means for technology to be expressive of social relations.
To be sure, artefacts are not simply neutral - they are created by social forces, and carry with them features reflecting their social nature (unlike natural phenomena which to date remain physically unaffected by human activities, e.g. asteroids). But, given the positions which the critique of TD leads some commentators to, we need to stress that technologies are not simply carriers of social values. To tone down the hyperbole with which Marshall McLuhan both popularised his important insights, and simultaneously undermined its usefulness as a tool for social analysis: the medium affects the message. The choice of the word 'shape' in the social shaping account is itself revealing: one shapes something, rather than conjuring it out of thin air or from a perfect vacuum. Sculptors' shaping is conditioned by their skills, by received aesthetic categories, by their personal desires and interests - and by the material with which they are working.
So it is with technology. Innovators search for, or construct, new product opportunities, which can further their aims and interests - though it is necessary to stress the complexity of even corporate profit-maximisation, and of the translation of such goals into individual motivation in corporate hierarchies.26 But the recognition, or identification, of opportunities is a product of technical knowledge as well as knowledge of markets. Technical knowledge involve beliefs and expectations as to the capacity of technologies to act upon and transform features of the physical world. And these beliefs and expectations, unlike faith in occult powers, can only be sustained in the long term by their correspondence with actual experience with technical capabilities. Technology does not have its own intrinsic momentum, generating its own natural trajectories. But nor can it be regarded as a tabula rasa, a magic slate upon which any message can be written. Technical knowledge, and perceptions as to the course of technological change - including revolutionary technological change - itself contributes critically to the evolution of technology. The point may seem elementary and overlaboured: but so intense has been the critique of TD1 that it seems to be overlooked in some analyses of consumer IT, as we shall see.
Debate about technology takes place in a material world wherein certain claims can be and are tested (and, often, tested more acutely than in science, where the truth claims and interpretation of evidence may remain contested). Certainly this testing is a social process: what is treated as a successful or
unsuccessful result is a matter of perceptions and criteria. But this testing has material implications - even if a firm has invested large sums of money in a technology, if it fails to work, the firm is liable to be informed rather decidedly by its customers of this fact. The innovation research literature may tend to overstate the rationality of the selection processes it describes - even though its studies of standards-setting and 'design paradigms' make it clear that it is by no means the 'most advanced' technology that emerges triumphant from competitive processes. But both types of selection process do involve some
testing of technologies in terms of whether they actually can do what they are being sold to do.
Technology is no tabula rasa, not is it not infinitely malleable. Technology is material, and like other material, it brings its own properties into social relations, which includes imposing its own conditions upon those who would shape it. (These may well go beyond the conditions which the would-be shapers expected it to have.) Since technologies involve effecting changes in the world through controlling material processes, and since material processes come in many kinds, so technologies come in many kinds. Again the point seems obvious: the technologies that move human beings around the British Isles are necessarily different (at our present state of understanding) from those that transmit and
receive electromagnetic radiation of one or another kind, for example. Different technologies allow for different sorts of control over different sorts of process.
Technological Determinism 2: the impacts of technology
The second aspect of TD (we shall label it TD2) is less concerned with the genesis of technology and technological change (which TD1 centres on), than with its consequences. TD1 portrays technological change as a relentless accumulation of technical knowledge, mainly driven by the goal of satisfying human needs (even if these needs are frequently distorted or poorly expressed). While the critique of TD1 social forces as shaping technology, TD2 portrays technology as relentlessly shaping society. Just as in TD1 the word "discoveries" is highly revealing, so for TD2 the term "impacts" (or "effects") is particularly significant. Technology is portrayed in TD2 as a material force that impacts upon social affairs. Now, certainly the social world is built upon and can be affected by nonsocial factors - an asteroid plunging into the Pacific would have more than a geophysical impact! But, with the exception of catastrophes so calamitous that they immediately wipe us out as a species, what we make of such environmental changes will be a product of human action.
Human action is constrained by the material world - we cannot wish away the weather (although we can shield ourselves from it to some extent, and we can unwittingly affect it, as in the greenhouse effect). But the nature of these constraints varies as we develop technical capacities to intervene into more and more aspects of the material world. And human action depends crucially upon our cognitive and organisational capacities to recognise and realise alternative responses to changing circumstances. Artefacts, too, can impact upon people - a bullet can leave a very nasty hole in you, and change your behaviour in a very gross way. Pharmaceuticals can likewise affect behaviour, although when the doses involved are below the threshold of narcosis there is considerable psychological and sociological evidence to the effect that the way in which a drug-user reacts to the substance is very much a function of interpretations and expectations of the experience.
TD2 is less concerned with such gross 'effects' in any case, as with social rather than physical or biological impacts of technology. Implicitly, technology is thus portrayed as a social rather than merely a physical agent. TD2 sees technologies as producing specific social consequences. Particular patterns of use are called into play by technologies, both for individual users and for the organisational structures within which the individuals and the artefacts are located. While there is no denying that any given device can be used in a variety of ways, the argument is, rather, that there are ineluctable consequences of the use of technologies. Technologies may, of course, be used poorly or improperly; but their inherent characteristics imply patterns of effective use. These superior practices are liable to be selected in the course of social evolution (whether by markets or by superior planning rationality is again a matter of contention). Thus industrial systems imply the pattern of organisation of modern industrial society (as in developmentalist and 'convergence' theories), television creates a global village (as McLuhan argued), new Information Technologies are 'technologies of freedom' (in Pool's terminology) and even responsible for the end of communism in Eastern Europe, and so on.
TD2 is commonly challenged on the grounds that the very same devices are given very diverse receptions in different cultures. Technologies may carry a text, as several commentators have argued, but even "pure" texts can be read in very different ways: recall the studies of how Dallas is interpreted in different societies.32 There is - pace economists - not a best practice for most industrial technologies; rather, even in terms of narrow economic criteria and calculi, patterns of use will depend upon historically contingent factor prices, and the use of technology is as 'path-dependent' as technological development itself. More generally, there is considerable evidence that similar technologies are employed in different ways or in different forms, in different countries and cultures.
Thus even a very specific new IT like Numerically Controlled Machine Tool is employed in quite different ways in France, Germany and the UK. Technologies form one set of tools, one set of resources for developing strategies, among others in the pursuit of social goals. It is social forces that determine the balance of influence of factors.
More sophisticated versions of TD2 will accept this much, but go on to argue that competitive forces in practice effect a selection process. Certain ways of using technologies, requiring particular constellations of social relations, prove to be more efficient or more profitable in securing organisational ends. Those organisations that have adopted these methods of use gain larger market shares and/or political and cultural influence. While selection processes are clearly under way, and they may well be represented in terms of economic rationality, there are several reasons for being dissatisfied with this account. It assumes that an idealised operation of markets (and firm decision-making) is an adequate description of the real world of economic institutions; it neglects the social shaping of technology which means that numerous variants of, say, a 'Machine Tool' may be in existence; and it is a curiously static, equilibrium-oriented view to be forthcoming from innovation researchers who otherwise emphasise the dynamic nature of ongoing technological change.
What Do Consumer Technologies Express?
The 'social shaping' approach has resulted in sophisticated analyses of some IT developments. However, the development of the approach to consumer technology tends to be one in which subtlety gets displaced by stridency. It is as if the analysis of consumer technology were stuck in the stage which analysis of industrial systems entered immediately the force of Braverman's critique was realised. In this period of 'Bravermania', it was almost an article of faith that new technologies were designed to deskill the workforce, and were, furthermore, achieving this end. Technologies were 'expressive' of management values - of the desire to subjugate labour by removing its skills and the associated scope for discretion over the work process.
The first generations of industrial microelectronics emerging at the end of the 1970s, in particular, was interpreted as a new extension of deskilling technology - this was coupled with fears of job losses, to provide an alarming forecast of the medium-term evolution of paid work. With the passage of time, the starknesss of this forecast was qualified from several directions. Deskilling came to be seen as only one strategy which management may pursue in its search for profit and competitiveness. (Other motives, such as product innovation, may promote technological change; and other ways of extracting intense labour from the workforce may be employed, building on existing skills rather than simply obliterating them.) Even if managers pursue strategies, they are not omnipotent: workers are liable to defend their areas of influence, and may be able to affect the implementation of new technologies (if not the initial choice of technologies) to a greater or lesser degree. Nor are managers omniscient: their understandings both of technologies and of the labour process may be too restricted to allow them to make the choices their strategies would really imply.
The designers of technologies are likewise limited in their appraisals, and, furthermore, will often be seeking to satisfy a complex of specific industrial demands in order to gain the widest markets for their process technologies. There is 'overselling' of what can be achieved with new technologies in order to secure the necessary investment funds. The material propertes of technical systems mean that they may not function as intended, and that R&D programmes may actually fail. And so on. In the consumer technology field, the view that technologies are 'expressive' of innovators' values is still expressed in terms reminiscent of the early labour process debate. New consumer products are, perhaps, a patriarchal ploy, designed to keep women chained to domestic labour - more work for mother35 - or to 'proletarianise' this housework. Or they are expressive of Taylorist values, part of a grand strategy to impose technical rationality on everyday life.
New IT products reflect the 'toys for the boys' mentality of male innovators. Instead of tackling the oppressive labour of housework - cleaning, bedmaking, and almost everyone's nemesis, ironing - they offer only gimmicky gadgets and better entertainment devices. New consumer technology, then, is portrayed as being expressive of class, gender, and other power-based values. These values are written into technology - they are the 'technology text' for those with eyes to read it. These values are used to shape technologies with rather more freedom than the sculptor is able to bring to bear to the stone, since the nature of the 'stone' is rarely attended to (beside vague references to its origins in earlier rounds of oppression - e.g. the supposed military genesis of the chip). The knowledge base, and the features of the material world, on which the text is written is portrayed with so little content that it effectively a tabula rasa. The message constitutes the medium, as were. These accounts do not have much to say about differences among technologies, except insofar as they imply, claim, or demonstrate that technologies of a very different kinds might exist.
Expressive approaches see certain technologies and lines of technological development as being suppressed by the dominant power relations. Selection processes are, in effect, undertaken within hegemonic structures. These will often be within the laboratory or board of management, as decision makers make choices expressive of their own values and programmes. It may also be argued that market selection is manipulated, to a greater or lesser extent, by advertising and other means of social control. But this choice is bounded by a number of factors over and above innovators' values. Values (and other factors such as perceptions of the marketability of innovations) may well come into play when it comes to choosing between different ways of applying a technological principle. But a great deal of innovation begins precisely with such a technological principle, rather than with a perception of a problem that needs solving. (This will be strikingly apparent in our case studies.)
It may be tempting to consider the absence of certain classes of innovation as a matter of blinkered attitudes, unsupportive values, or even of conspiracies among suppliers. (E.g. men seeking to keep women chained to housework.) Such an impression is yielded by certain feminist critics, who argue that what we really need in the home is ways to automate laborious and time- consuming tasks such as vacuum cleaning and bed-making, that innovators are (deliberately or unconsciously) ignoring opportunities here.
Class, gender and related factors are extremely important, though their complexity and diversity is frequently understated. But the development of new products, and the effort to locate product opportunities, is not simply expressive of these interests. These activities take place on a terrain constituted in part by market structures, by social networks among innovators, by corporate interests - and which is crucially structured by the technological knowledge that has already been accumulated. This knowledge is used in the construction and realisation of technological opportunities. What innovation theories tell us is that not all items of knowledge in this arena are equal. Revolutionary technologies represent privileged knowledge, which is paid more attention precisely because they are known to be associated with opportunities for applications of many kinds, and because one's competitors are likely to be swarming around them. The innovation literature, and our own studies, would suggest that innovators are most frequently pursuing opportunities perceived on the basis of knowledge of existing technologies and expectations as to their trajectories. In other words, innovations are developed on the back of past innovations. The absence of the sorts of labour-saving innovation cited above may derive from the lack of perceived opportunities for applying technologies to these functions (at viable costs), rather than from an absolute lack of attention.
Of course, there may be technological solutions which could be developed out of existing knowledge if sufficient attention was paid to these problems. The fact that no evident solutions are on the horizon (apparently) does not have to rule out major R&D programmes - it has not stopped certain lines of cancer research, for example. But in the cancer case there are charities and public authorities to be tapped for funds, and promising lines from which pharmaceutical companies and practising scientists might be expected to profit whether or not cures remain elusive. The point is that accusations of conspiracy (which may sometimes exist) or masculine bias (which certainly does exist) are insufficient and misleading as explanations of the pattern of current consumer technology innovation.
Two aspects of this are particularly relevant here. First, efforts to create new products are likely to reflect engineering visions of technical progress rather than to be influenced highly by marketing considerations. In the early phases of a technological revolution, 'technology-push' is a material phenomenon: not that technology is doing any pushing, but that the technical experts are. They are finding solutions and then looking for problems. And their solutions are largely based upon extrapolations of known technical potentials, and upon the effort to create 'technically neat' results. Thus teletext is reported to have originated in desires to make use of 'wasted' capacity in broadcast transmissions; home automation visions derive from engineers' hopes of rationalising the proliferation of microprocessor controls, and of simultaneously making use of their intrinsic communication capabilities. Second, core technologies are, as argued above, specific technologies, relevant to effecting specific transformations in the material world.
New IT involves, tautologically, the processing of information - microelectronics enables the application of new, and powerful, ways of 'capturing'/presenting, storing/retrieving, transmitting/receiving, and manipulating data of all kinds. Its applications, then, are ones that build upon these capabilities. These can be very diverse - from satellite communications to industrial robots, from 'smart' telephones to High-definition TV, from computer games to videotex systems. They can be very diverse, precisely because IT can be used to enhance the informational components of just about any product. But they are not infinitely diverse: IT does not itself supply means of effecting new physical transformations, unless these are ones that can be achieved by bringing more powerful information- processing to other technologies (as in new materials and biotechnology).
Ian Miles
(These are notes taken from a paper i presented at a conference years back - 1989 to be precise) and never got round to writing up properly with footnotes etc.)
One of the most prominent themes in social science (especially sociological) writings on technology and society is the critique of technological determinism. In addition to intellectual reason for rejecting this viewpoint, technological determinism (TD) is seen as functioning as an ideology of the classic kind. TD is believed to inhibit social action by portraying technology as determinant of social change rather than the other way round. "You can't fight progress" is a slogan of the age - and what could be more progressive than technical progress? After all, will not the development of the productive forces burst asunder the obsolete social relations which currently fetter us?
The critique has been elaborated in numerous ways by social scientists of different persuasions - with much mutual recrimination. Many of those who have set out to criticise TD find themselves accused by yet other commentators (who regard themselves as even more incisive) as still falling into a TD
trap. To clarify the discussion, we can distinguish two aspects of TD. (These are seen as bound together in different ways by different critics.)
Technological Determinism 1: Technology As Asocial
This first form of technological determinism portrays technologies as being the way they are simply because that is the way the natural world is. Technologies are expressions of the laws of nature, in that the reason why they work is because they obey these laws - and the reason why magic does not work is because it pays them no regard. No-one would seek to deny the existence of technological change, of course, or the role of human agents in effecting this change. But human history is a story of technological progress, in which increasing insight into these natural laws is reflected in increasingly efficient and effective technologies.
More or less sophisticated versions of this TD perspective (we shall label it TD1) are highly influential, as revealed in everyday descriptions of heroic inventors as the "discoverers" of the calculus, the electric light bulb, nuclear power, or whatever. For TD1, it seems almost as if technologies are Platonic ideals, that they are "out there" in the way that America was awaiting Columbus.20 As the age of discovery led to the gradual filling-in of maps of the world, so technical change itself follows a more-or-less natural pattern. We come to understand nature better, our technical knowledge accumulates, and we experience technological progress. There is effectively a logic which takes us from partial to more complete knowledge, from elementary to more sophisticated technologies.
The broad course of technological development seems almost preordained in unsophisticated versions of TD1. In practice, social factors necessarily creep in. Just as Columbus might not have raised finance, or might have been following an entirely different hunch - or a different set of economic interests - so
technological development may be delayed, or distorted. Nobody can be unaware of the vast resources devoted to the development of military technology - indeed, a cursory look at the history of technology shows that this is by no means a twentieth century phenomenon. Although this is invariably overstated by the proponents and beneficiaries of these programmes, many significant developments actually have been "spin-offs" of military research and development. TD1 might recuperate this statement, of course, by citing it as evidence that even warped priorities cannot keep the technological truth from emerging!
This is not just a matter of military priorities. From the perspective of TD1, social structures of many kinds can delay and distort technological development. This brings us to the classic debates of political economy. For the right, a minimally-regulated market would allow the untrammelled expression of human needs and accumulation of knowledge: unfortunately, in contemporary societies, planning frequently interferes. Not only does planning distort social affairs, but it also hinders realisation of technological progress, by imposing faulty, bureaucratically-biassed, interests on innovative individuals.
For the (classic) left, in contrast, markets set people against each other, and prioritise needs according to financial clout; some form of democratic planning should offer the opportunity for formulating social needs more adequately, though in practice, most planning has been subservient to market or other vested interests.
From either perspective, it is an imperfect world; even if "you can't stop progress", you can delay it, usually at your own or your neighbour's cost. The broad course of technological development is liable to be slowed down, or perhaps warped and biassed in some details. But someone else is likely to forge
ahead anyway. There are striking similarities with the worldview of neoclassical economics, in both the left and (less surprisingly) the right-wing versions of TD1. A model of rational activity is set up (by deduction rather than from empirical analyses of economic and technological behaviour); it is then assumed that real-life activity basically represents a distortion of this ideal state of affairs. Normative
conclusions and policy prescriptions almost entirely consist of statements to the effect that the real world should be brought into closer synchrony with the model.
But is not the notion of a 'natural' course of technological change, from which there can be biasses or distortions, itself a form of TD? Discounting the very different attitudes to technology that exist among different societies, modern times are unique in the institutionalisation of Research and Development (R&D) to create new technologies in the service of commercial and military competition. But even so, particular social circumstances lead to actors developing interests in applying knowledge to particular ends. These circumstances include the specific technical capabilities and market structures within which R&D programmes are launched and implemented. Historical contingencies lead to what innovation researchers term "path-determined" technological development, as documented in studies
of firms and of major groups of technology. Small variations in empirical circumstances might have resulted in remarkably different configurations of technologies.
Thus this critique of TD12stresses that technology is social. The interests to which technological development is attuned; the types of resources which different actors can bring to bear on stimulating such technological development; and the views of science and society, and even of the nature and role of rationalities of various kinds, within which these activities take place; all of these are social products. Thus whether technological development simply expresses the dominant interests in society, or is some more complicated expression of heterogeneous social processes, becomes a key question. Equally
important is the matter of just what it means for technology to be expressive of social relations.
To be sure, artefacts are not simply neutral - they are created by social forces, and carry with them features reflecting their social nature (unlike natural phenomena which to date remain physically unaffected by human activities, e.g. asteroids). But, given the positions which the critique of TD leads some commentators to, we need to stress that technologies are not simply carriers of social values. To tone down the hyperbole with which Marshall McLuhan both popularised his important insights, and simultaneously undermined its usefulness as a tool for social analysis: the medium affects the message. The choice of the word 'shape' in the social shaping account is itself revealing: one shapes something, rather than conjuring it out of thin air or from a perfect vacuum. Sculptors' shaping is conditioned by their skills, by received aesthetic categories, by their personal desires and interests - and by the material with which they are working.
So it is with technology. Innovators search for, or construct, new product opportunities, which can further their aims and interests - though it is necessary to stress the complexity of even corporate profit-maximisation, and of the translation of such goals into individual motivation in corporate hierarchies.26 But the recognition, or identification, of opportunities is a product of technical knowledge as well as knowledge of markets. Technical knowledge involve beliefs and expectations as to the capacity of technologies to act upon and transform features of the physical world. And these beliefs and expectations, unlike faith in occult powers, can only be sustained in the long term by their correspondence with actual experience with technical capabilities. Technology does not have its own intrinsic momentum, generating its own natural trajectories. But nor can it be regarded as a tabula rasa, a magic slate upon which any message can be written. Technical knowledge, and perceptions as to the course of technological change - including revolutionary technological change - itself contributes critically to the evolution of technology. The point may seem elementary and overlaboured: but so intense has been the critique of TD1 that it seems to be overlooked in some analyses of consumer IT, as we shall see.
Debate about technology takes place in a material world wherein certain claims can be and are tested (and, often, tested more acutely than in science, where the truth claims and interpretation of evidence may remain contested). Certainly this testing is a social process: what is treated as a successful or
unsuccessful result is a matter of perceptions and criteria. But this testing has material implications - even if a firm has invested large sums of money in a technology, if it fails to work, the firm is liable to be informed rather decidedly by its customers of this fact. The innovation research literature may tend to overstate the rationality of the selection processes it describes - even though its studies of standards-setting and 'design paradigms' make it clear that it is by no means the 'most advanced' technology that emerges triumphant from competitive processes. But both types of selection process do involve some
testing of technologies in terms of whether they actually can do what they are being sold to do.
Technology is no tabula rasa, not is it not infinitely malleable. Technology is material, and like other material, it brings its own properties into social relations, which includes imposing its own conditions upon those who would shape it. (These may well go beyond the conditions which the would-be shapers expected it to have.) Since technologies involve effecting changes in the world through controlling material processes, and since material processes come in many kinds, so technologies come in many kinds. Again the point seems obvious: the technologies that move human beings around the British Isles are necessarily different (at our present state of understanding) from those that transmit and
receive electromagnetic radiation of one or another kind, for example. Different technologies allow for different sorts of control over different sorts of process.
Technological Determinism 2: the impacts of technology
The second aspect of TD (we shall label it TD2) is less concerned with the genesis of technology and technological change (which TD1 centres on), than with its consequences. TD1 portrays technological change as a relentless accumulation of technical knowledge, mainly driven by the goal of satisfying human needs (even if these needs are frequently distorted or poorly expressed). While the critique of TD1 social forces as shaping technology, TD2 portrays technology as relentlessly shaping society. Just as in TD1 the word "discoveries" is highly revealing, so for TD2 the term "impacts" (or "effects") is particularly significant. Technology is portrayed in TD2 as a material force that impacts upon social affairs. Now, certainly the social world is built upon and can be affected by nonsocial factors - an asteroid plunging into the Pacific would have more than a geophysical impact! But, with the exception of catastrophes so calamitous that they immediately wipe us out as a species, what we make of such environmental changes will be a product of human action.
Human action is constrained by the material world - we cannot wish away the weather (although we can shield ourselves from it to some extent, and we can unwittingly affect it, as in the greenhouse effect). But the nature of these constraints varies as we develop technical capacities to intervene into more and more aspects of the material world. And human action depends crucially upon our cognitive and organisational capacities to recognise and realise alternative responses to changing circumstances. Artefacts, too, can impact upon people - a bullet can leave a very nasty hole in you, and change your behaviour in a very gross way. Pharmaceuticals can likewise affect behaviour, although when the doses involved are below the threshold of narcosis there is considerable psychological and sociological evidence to the effect that the way in which a drug-user reacts to the substance is very much a function of interpretations and expectations of the experience.
TD2 is less concerned with such gross 'effects' in any case, as with social rather than physical or biological impacts of technology. Implicitly, technology is thus portrayed as a social rather than merely a physical agent. TD2 sees technologies as producing specific social consequences. Particular patterns of use are called into play by technologies, both for individual users and for the organisational structures within which the individuals and the artefacts are located. While there is no denying that any given device can be used in a variety of ways, the argument is, rather, that there are ineluctable consequences of the use of technologies. Technologies may, of course, be used poorly or improperly; but their inherent characteristics imply patterns of effective use. These superior practices are liable to be selected in the course of social evolution (whether by markets or by superior planning rationality is again a matter of contention). Thus industrial systems imply the pattern of organisation of modern industrial society (as in developmentalist and 'convergence' theories), television creates a global village (as McLuhan argued), new Information Technologies are 'technologies of freedom' (in Pool's terminology) and even responsible for the end of communism in Eastern Europe, and so on.
TD2 is commonly challenged on the grounds that the very same devices are given very diverse receptions in different cultures. Technologies may carry a text, as several commentators have argued, but even "pure" texts can be read in very different ways: recall the studies of how Dallas is interpreted in different societies.32 There is - pace economists - not a best practice for most industrial technologies; rather, even in terms of narrow economic criteria and calculi, patterns of use will depend upon historically contingent factor prices, and the use of technology is as 'path-dependent' as technological development itself. More generally, there is considerable evidence that similar technologies are employed in different ways or in different forms, in different countries and cultures.
Thus even a very specific new IT like Numerically Controlled Machine Tool is employed in quite different ways in France, Germany and the UK. Technologies form one set of tools, one set of resources for developing strategies, among others in the pursuit of social goals. It is social forces that determine the balance of influence of factors.
More sophisticated versions of TD2 will accept this much, but go on to argue that competitive forces in practice effect a selection process. Certain ways of using technologies, requiring particular constellations of social relations, prove to be more efficient or more profitable in securing organisational ends. Those organisations that have adopted these methods of use gain larger market shares and/or political and cultural influence. While selection processes are clearly under way, and they may well be represented in terms of economic rationality, there are several reasons for being dissatisfied with this account. It assumes that an idealised operation of markets (and firm decision-making) is an adequate description of the real world of economic institutions; it neglects the social shaping of technology which means that numerous variants of, say, a 'Machine Tool' may be in existence; and it is a curiously static, equilibrium-oriented view to be forthcoming from innovation researchers who otherwise emphasise the dynamic nature of ongoing technological change.
What Do Consumer Technologies Express?
The 'social shaping' approach has resulted in sophisticated analyses of some IT developments. However, the development of the approach to consumer technology tends to be one in which subtlety gets displaced by stridency. It is as if the analysis of consumer technology were stuck in the stage which analysis of industrial systems entered immediately the force of Braverman's critique was realised. In this period of 'Bravermania', it was almost an article of faith that new technologies were designed to deskill the workforce, and were, furthermore, achieving this end. Technologies were 'expressive' of management values - of the desire to subjugate labour by removing its skills and the associated scope for discretion over the work process.
The first generations of industrial microelectronics emerging at the end of the 1970s, in particular, was interpreted as a new extension of deskilling technology - this was coupled with fears of job losses, to provide an alarming forecast of the medium-term evolution of paid work. With the passage of time, the starknesss of this forecast was qualified from several directions. Deskilling came to be seen as only one strategy which management may pursue in its search for profit and competitiveness. (Other motives, such as product innovation, may promote technological change; and other ways of extracting intense labour from the workforce may be employed, building on existing skills rather than simply obliterating them.) Even if managers pursue strategies, they are not omnipotent: workers are liable to defend their areas of influence, and may be able to affect the implementation of new technologies (if not the initial choice of technologies) to a greater or lesser degree. Nor are managers omniscient: their understandings both of technologies and of the labour process may be too restricted to allow them to make the choices their strategies would really imply.
The designers of technologies are likewise limited in their appraisals, and, furthermore, will often be seeking to satisfy a complex of specific industrial demands in order to gain the widest markets for their process technologies. There is 'overselling' of what can be achieved with new technologies in order to secure the necessary investment funds. The material propertes of technical systems mean that they may not function as intended, and that R&D programmes may actually fail. And so on. In the consumer technology field, the view that technologies are 'expressive' of innovators' values is still expressed in terms reminiscent of the early labour process debate. New consumer products are, perhaps, a patriarchal ploy, designed to keep women chained to domestic labour - more work for mother35 - or to 'proletarianise' this housework. Or they are expressive of Taylorist values, part of a grand strategy to impose technical rationality on everyday life.
New IT products reflect the 'toys for the boys' mentality of male innovators. Instead of tackling the oppressive labour of housework - cleaning, bedmaking, and almost everyone's nemesis, ironing - they offer only gimmicky gadgets and better entertainment devices. New consumer technology, then, is portrayed as being expressive of class, gender, and other power-based values. These values are written into technology - they are the 'technology text' for those with eyes to read it. These values are used to shape technologies with rather more freedom than the sculptor is able to bring to bear to the stone, since the nature of the 'stone' is rarely attended to (beside vague references to its origins in earlier rounds of oppression - e.g. the supposed military genesis of the chip). The knowledge base, and the features of the material world, on which the text is written is portrayed with so little content that it effectively a tabula rasa. The message constitutes the medium, as were. These accounts do not have much to say about differences among technologies, except insofar as they imply, claim, or demonstrate that technologies of a very different kinds might exist.
Expressive approaches see certain technologies and lines of technological development as being suppressed by the dominant power relations. Selection processes are, in effect, undertaken within hegemonic structures. These will often be within the laboratory or board of management, as decision makers make choices expressive of their own values and programmes. It may also be argued that market selection is manipulated, to a greater or lesser extent, by advertising and other means of social control. But this choice is bounded by a number of factors over and above innovators' values. Values (and other factors such as perceptions of the marketability of innovations) may well come into play when it comes to choosing between different ways of applying a technological principle. But a great deal of innovation begins precisely with such a technological principle, rather than with a perception of a problem that needs solving. (This will be strikingly apparent in our case studies.)
It may be tempting to consider the absence of certain classes of innovation as a matter of blinkered attitudes, unsupportive values, or even of conspiracies among suppliers. (E.g. men seeking to keep women chained to housework.) Such an impression is yielded by certain feminist critics, who argue that what we really need in the home is ways to automate laborious and time- consuming tasks such as vacuum cleaning and bed-making, that innovators are (deliberately or unconsciously) ignoring opportunities here.
Class, gender and related factors are extremely important, though their complexity and diversity is frequently understated. But the development of new products, and the effort to locate product opportunities, is not simply expressive of these interests. These activities take place on a terrain constituted in part by market structures, by social networks among innovators, by corporate interests - and which is crucially structured by the technological knowledge that has already been accumulated. This knowledge is used in the construction and realisation of technological opportunities. What innovation theories tell us is that not all items of knowledge in this arena are equal. Revolutionary technologies represent privileged knowledge, which is paid more attention precisely because they are known to be associated with opportunities for applications of many kinds, and because one's competitors are likely to be swarming around them. The innovation literature, and our own studies, would suggest that innovators are most frequently pursuing opportunities perceived on the basis of knowledge of existing technologies and expectations as to their trajectories. In other words, innovations are developed on the back of past innovations. The absence of the sorts of labour-saving innovation cited above may derive from the lack of perceived opportunities for applying technologies to these functions (at viable costs), rather than from an absolute lack of attention.
Of course, there may be technological solutions which could be developed out of existing knowledge if sufficient attention was paid to these problems. The fact that no evident solutions are on the horizon (apparently) does not have to rule out major R&D programmes - it has not stopped certain lines of cancer research, for example. But in the cancer case there are charities and public authorities to be tapped for funds, and promising lines from which pharmaceutical companies and practising scientists might be expected to profit whether or not cures remain elusive. The point is that accusations of conspiracy (which may sometimes exist) or masculine bias (which certainly does exist) are insufficient and misleading as explanations of the pattern of current consumer technology innovation.
Two aspects of this are particularly relevant here. First, efforts to create new products are likely to reflect engineering visions of technical progress rather than to be influenced highly by marketing considerations. In the early phases of a technological revolution, 'technology-push' is a material phenomenon: not that technology is doing any pushing, but that the technical experts are. They are finding solutions and then looking for problems. And their solutions are largely based upon extrapolations of known technical potentials, and upon the effort to create 'technically neat' results. Thus teletext is reported to have originated in desires to make use of 'wasted' capacity in broadcast transmissions; home automation visions derive from engineers' hopes of rationalising the proliferation of microprocessor controls, and of simultaneously making use of their intrinsic communication capabilities. Second, core technologies are, as argued above, specific technologies, relevant to effecting specific transformations in the material world.
New IT involves, tautologically, the processing of information - microelectronics enables the application of new, and powerful, ways of 'capturing'/presenting, storing/retrieving, transmitting/receiving, and manipulating data of all kinds. Its applications, then, are ones that build upon these capabilities. These can be very diverse - from satellite communications to industrial robots, from 'smart' telephones to High-definition TV, from computer games to videotex systems. They can be very diverse, precisely because IT can be used to enhance the informational components of just about any product. But they are not infinitely diverse: IT does not itself supply means of effecting new physical transformations, unless these are ones that can be achieved by bringing more powerful information- processing to other technologies (as in new materials and biotechnology).
