Being Sociological
Chapter 19
Connecting
What is Technology?
Technologies are means to ends. They perform
various functions. They help us adapt to or control
environments, extend human forces and senses,
solve problems (and sometimes create new ones),
and fulfill needs and desires. Most dictionary
definitions of technology stress utility.
We use technologies:
• to improve our existence;
• to make our lives easier;
• to save time and effort.
Sociologists expand upon these common sense
definitions.
Sociologists draw attention to three separate meanings of
technology:
• Technology as physical, such as tools or machines.
They might be very simple, such as a stone tool, or they
may be complex, like the recently retired space shuttle
which has one and a half million separate components.
• Technology as human activities;
• Technology as knowledge (MacKenzie and Wajcman,
1985, p. 3).
While three different definitions of technology have
been identified, they all combine in use.
An Example of Combined
Technology
• Reading a book requires an object (the book), an activity
(reading), and knowledge (of the language in the book).
The enterprise will fail if any of these three elements is
removed.
• This connects to W. Brian Arthur’s (2009, p. 27) thinking
about technology. He suggests thinking about technology
in three ways:
• As means to ends;
• As combinations of practices and things (software and
hardware);
• As the complete collection of devices and practices that
a society has available to it (captured by statements like
‘Technology is increasing the pace of our lives’).
Technologies are produced to create certain
effects. For these to be realised the user needs to
know how to operate them. This takes us into the
realm of practices and questions of technique.
While the early phases of the Industrial
Revolution were marked by individual machines
like the power loom, across time isolated devices
lost in significance to such systems.
Leo Marx refers to these as ‘socio-technical’
systems.
Leo Marx and the Example of the
Railroad
• The railroad involves a physical object, the steam train.
But to operate it requires many other objects, activities
and knowledge sets.
• The first necessary physical thing was the track itself.
Englishman George Stephenson built the first locomotive
in 1814, but it was only with the mass manufacture of iron
rails from 1820 onwards that the railway became a
possibility (Benjamin, 1999, p. 563).
• Other necessary objects included bridges, tunnels, rolling
stock, signals, and stations. As to activities, there are
numerous skilled workers involved in the construction,
operation and maintenance of railroads. These activities
entail specialist knowledge such as railroad engineering
and telegraphy.
The scope and complexity of these new systems also
necessitated a new ‘organizational matrix’ (L. Marx
1997). For the American railroads to be possible large
corporate business structures with significant capital
investment needed to be in place. The institutional
framing of railroad operations also included
standardisation of track gauges and time zones. The
combination of different types of railway technologies –
objects, practices, knowledges – results in a sociotechnical system. This brings us to a fourth useful
definition of technology: technology as a mode of
social organisation (Winner, 1977, p. 12).
The symbolic significance of
technology: connection to and
between groups
• The ‘totem’: Emile Durkheim (1965: 123) called the
species of things which defines a ‘clan’ its ‘totem’.
The totem can be read as a materialized and
externalized social fact.
• People and their totemic objects form a unified clan
system.
• Clan members find their humanity and tie
themselves to the collective through material
artefacts.
• The totem, then, acts as the focus of moral life.
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950)
• Mauss considered the stabilisation of social relations
between clans and groups.
• He talks about the law of things merging with the law of
people.
• Mauss’ well-known conclusion was that gifting, the giving of
a physical thing, appears disinterested and voluntary. But
appearances can be deceptive. Gifting is, in fact, selfinterested and obligatory. Such practices tie groups into
relations of reciprocity: people give objects, they receive
them, and they repay them. For once a gift is received the
recipient is effectively ‘bought’. The giver binds the
receiver, who is obliged to gift in return.
• In this way gifts go to the heart of material and moral life.
Technology’s connection to human
existence and class conflict
• Durkheim and Mauss’ work belongs to the
intellectual tradition called functionalism. This
sees society as a structure with integrated parts.
Functionalism stresses order and stability.
• In contrast, conflict theories dispense with
notions of harmony. They draw attention to
inequalities within society. They are finely
attuned to notions of power and privilege.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• Marx saw technologies as indices of social and
economic relations.
• Under capitalism technological innovation was
strongly connected to worker domination.
Technologies, argued Marx, helped to reproduce
a social order that benefited the ruling class by
exploiting the working-class.
Marx’s Arguments
• Marx offered a materialist take of people making their own
history by producing the means of their existence; this
necessarily entails the use of technology.
• In the preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Marx (1978, p.3-6) argued that in producing
social life people enter into certain relationships – relations
of production – connected to concrete productive forces
(technologies).
• These relations of production are the economic base of
society. They shape social and political existence.
• Marx believed that all economic formations (the ways in
which we make, trade and consume) are historical and
subject to change. The two great sources of change are the
division of labour and technologies. Each division of labour
has its own technical apparatus.
• Marx was highly critical of modern industry. The worker
had previously been in charge of tools; now machines
controlled workers.
• Machines making machines was the technical
foundation for transformation (Marx, 1990, p.506).
While machines can be continually bettered to increase
productivity, humans cannot. Machines transcend
biological limitations.
• Machinery also reduces the requirement for skilled
labour, creates unemployment in new areas, and its
refinement undermines existing jobs. As a
consequence, labour costs and demand for labour are
much reduced.
• In the battle between capital and labour, machines
weigh in for the former. They are implements of class
Marx urged the workers, having nothing to lose but their
bondage, to institute the overthrow of the ruling-class
and end their own exploitation.
This would implement:
•Shared ownership of the means of production;
•A planned economy to replace the anarchy of the
market;
•Use-values which satisfy human needs to replace
exchange values based on the sale and purchase of
goods in a capitalist market.
The material-symbolic significance of
technology: society as connection
Actor-Network Theory
•This captures the marriage of things and ideas,
the concrete and the conceptual.
•Sometimes called material-semiotics, which also
signals relationality. Semiotics is the study of
meaning and communication.
•ANT broadens this application from language to
all phenomena.
• ANT’s ultimate point is to explain what keeps society
together (Latour, 1992, p. 272).
• ANT’s explanatory framework stresses the stability and
durability of actor-networks, the strength or weakness
of associations.
• To do this it attends to two things that often escape the
social theorist’s attention. The first is the role of nonhumans (i.e. technologies). ANT stresses
heterogeneity. Networks are composed of a variety of
human and non-human elements.
• The second is the work done to make translations and
associations possible. Translation controls behaviour by
making it predictable. It connects disparate entities and
makes common cause where there was difference.
• ANT scholars are sceptical of the sort of ‘Big
Theory’ offered by Marx and Durkheim.
• ANT seeks to describe rather than explain, to tell
stories about how connections are made, how
relationships assemble – or fail to do so (Law,
2007).
Bruno Latour
• Bruno Latour (2005, p. 39) refers to
intermediaries and mediators: Marx and
Durkheim regarded technologies as neutral
intermediaries, in that they transport social force
without distortion.
• Latour argues that technologies permit
mediation in four senses. This gives us the
opportunity to think a little more about what
technology does.
• Technologies create interference, offering new possibilities;
• Technologies provide for new distributed practices, compositions
and associations. They afford the exchange of performances and
competencies.
• Technologies fold time and space. What is thought of as a blackboxed single thing (like a car or a toaster) is typically a complex
of integrated parts whose composition is variable, sometimes
stable and sometimes not. Latour (2002, p. 249) uses the
example of a hammer to note the folding of time and space.
Various ages are folded into the technology. The minerals in the
hammer are as old as the world itself, the wood in the handle will
be of a significantly lesser age, and the time since it left the
factory still less. The hammer holds together various spaces: a
German forest (the raw material for the shaft), a German mine
(the raw material for the head), a German factory (the site of the
hammer’s production), and a French work van (the site of its
sale).
• Technologies delegate. They cross boundaries between things
• Physical objects are the point of difference between
humans and other primates. Without them society is
not possible. Indeed, ANT severely doubts that a
purely social relation of the type that traditional
sociological explanations seem to rely on has ever
been observed (Latour, 1991, p. 110).
• ANT tells us not to think about social ties and moral
bonds. It urges us to think about translations and
associations. Society is not a substance, as
sociologists are typically inclined to describe it, but a
connection.
Connecting to yourself: the private
world of the iPod
• Sociology attempts to make sense of contemporary
society. Paul Virilio (2003, p. 50) argues that we are
witnessing a changing ‘topology’ of technology.
• He is one of several social theorists to argue that
gadgets define our times (see Baudrillard, 1999, p.
77).
• This takes us from the domain of work to that of
leisure and from the collective of class to the solitary
individual.
Michael Bull (2007)
He set out to map the experiences of iPod users by
way of a 34-question survey posted in various print
and online media, including the New York Times, the
Guardian and Mac World. Over 1000 people,
concentrated in Anglo-American countries,
responded. They tended to be reasonably wealthy,
employed in media and advertising, their median age
was 34, and their gender balance was roughly equal.
Bull (2007, p. 4) noted that half of all Australians
owned an MP3 player, while Chinese and Korean
ownership levels were at the 70% mark:
‘For the first time in history the majority of citizens
in Western culture possess the technology to
create their own private mobile auditory world
wherever they go’.
• For most of human history listening was a
democratic activity. People would hear what
everyone around them did. It was only with the
development of the personal stereo that listening
was privatized and made portable. Nowadays we
take this for granted.
• The iPod enables different ways of hearing, seeing
and being. These devices affect how we look at
(and to) others, how we interact with them and what
we think about our environment.
One of Bull’s respondents – Joey – told him how her iPod
gives her environmental and social control:
I see them [people] as an obstacle. I have to deal with
crowded streets and subways all the time, and the iPod
helps me cope with this…I listen to my iPod while running
errands around the city. You have men making comments
at you like “Yo, Baby” and then you have people trying to
hand you religious flyers, or tourists trying to get
directions, and all I want to do is grocery-shop and go to
the bank. If I have my headphones on I am invisible and I
do not have to get intimidated by jerky men or disrupted
by lost tourists (Bull, 2007, p. 31).
Some users reported that they could be rude without
appearing rude: ‘The iPod makes me feel like I can
edit what I’m doing. If I want to talk to someone I can
take the headphones off and talk, but if I don’t want to
talk I can keep on walking. The person will just think I
didn’t hear them because I’m distracted by my music
instead of ignoring them on purpose’ (Amanda, quoted
in Bull, 2007, p. 58).
What does this mean for the public
sphere?
At any one time something like one in seven city
dwellers will be using a mobile device (Katz cited in
Bull, 2007, p. 84). This has profound implications for
the metropolitan experience. Bull (2007, p. 52) is
sensitive to the ways in which the iPod specifically
contributes to the ‘architecture of isolation’, although
to be fair numerous other technologies have also been
accused of this.
• iPod use acts as a boundary marker, a type of “Do not
disturb” sign to those around signalling that the user
wishes to be left to their own devices.
• The iPod therefore joins a long line of other
technologies – cars, personal stereos, mobile phones,
laptops, PDAs – to have mediatized public space (Bull,
2007, p. 54).
• Some of the unintended consequences of iPod
technology are minor social irritations, such as the part it
plays in damaging hearing, its contribution to the dent in
corporate music industry profits through illegal
downloading, sound pollution through ear pod leakage
and annoyance from tuneless sing-a-longs. Of more
concern are the threatened large-scale social
transformations.
• iPods allow us to absent ourselves from those around
us. With an iPod we are no longer occupants of a
shared world, but authors of our own world, albeit in
limited ways. This, Bull says, contributes to ‘urban
chill’. It creates distance, exclusivity and
disconnection. Warmth, in contrast, speaks to
closeness, inclusivity and connection. Bull notes an
inverse relation between the two: the warmer our
personal space, the chillier our urban space. Mobile
technologies produce the same effect. They let us
connect to others not in our presence. We ignore
those that are.
• Baudrillard also noted the terrible toll such gadgets
have on the social fabric. He predicted a future public
space populated by ‘zombies’ plugged into various
mobile devices. These new urban people will not relate
to their immediate environment nor connect with others
in close proximity: ‘Everyone will be simultaneously
elsewhere’ (Baudrillard, 2003, p. 24).
• With a cell phone there is at least someone else. With
an iPod you are connecting to yourself (Bull, 2007, p.
85).
Is technology making us less social?
People are not necessarily less social, but they are
more selectively social. They bond with those they
choose to. Technologies provide new ways of
ignoring people and new ways of connecting with
them; they provide new ways of managing relations.
• Our technologies have surpassed the ability to
construct built domains; they also have the ability to
transgress them. ‘Physically bound spaces are less
significant when information is able to pass through
walls and simultaneously travel great distances’ (Willis,
2007, p. 159).
• The social bond has been uncoupled from spatial
constraints. Co-presence is not a condition for
communication. This means that technology needs to
figure in our thinking as much as topology.
Conclusion
We relate to, with and through technology. These
technologies are mediators. They change thoughts and
deeds, our sense of self and others, our orientation to the
world (Turkle 2005, pp. 18-9).
This technology is always on, and it is always on us.
Current technologies create a new ‘tethered’ self. This is
perhaps put best by a BlackBerry user who told Turkle
(2006, p. 13) ‘I glance at my watch to sense the time; I
glance at my BlackBerry to get a sense of my life’.
Technologies help construct society
Technologies have been discussed as originators of the
social, as stabilisers of collectivities and wider society.
For Latour, things play such an important role as they
are frequently more stable, docile, durable, reliable and
even moral than human beings (the speed bump is
always on duty). As such they solve ‘the problem of
building society on a large scale’ (Strum and Latour,
1987: 796). Put simply, technologies give society
sturdiness.
For sociologists a full appreciation of technology must go
from conception to consumption. We may love our
mobile devices, but spare a thought for those that extract
the ‘conflict minerals’ necessary to their functioning
(Eichstaedt, 2011) and those that labour shifts more than
a day long to bring them into being (Malone and Jones,
2010). Further, there is an important sociological
question to be asked: for whom do networks work? What
about those left outside them?
Susan Leigh Star (1991, p. 42) suggests that we pay
serious attention to the marginalized and the oppressed,
those who do not get to design or control technologies but
who are nonetheless compelled to feel their effects.
These points were first raised by Marx in the nineteenth
century. They are equally important in the twenty first.
Discussion Point 1: Technology and
Surveillance
•Do you live in a surveillance society? Is this a bad
thing?
•What private data of yours do you think third
parties have access to?
•What can strangers learn about you from looking
online?
Discussion Point 2: Tools Are Us
•What technologies do you feel closest to? Why?
•In what ways do technologies contribute to your
identity?
•Are there technologies that you can’t live without?