TECHNOLOGY + INFORMATION –
SOCIETY = ?
COMN 2312, Jan 25 Lecture
ANNOUNCEMENT
 Prophetic
McLuhan – Douglas Coupland in
Conversation with B.W. Powe
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Jan 28, 2011, 4pm-6pm
Douglas Coupland in conversation with B.W. Powe on
Coupland's new biography of Marshall McLuhan.
 Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Microserfs, will
be speaking on his new biography of Marshall McLuhan.
 The event will be part of the launch of Marshall McLuhan
centenary celebrations that will be taking place throughout
Canada, the United States and Europe
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Location:
Founders College Assembly Hall
Sponsor: The McLuhan Initiative, Founders College,
Department of English and Canadian Studies
 See
http://www.yorku.ca/yuevents/index.asp?Event=21938&Categor
y=0&ShowCal=&TimeSame=Jan&Month=1&Year=2011&EventTi
tle=York%20Events:%20Prophetic+McLuhan+%96+Douglas+Cou
pland+in+Conversation+with+B.W.+Powe
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AGENDA
Innis, McLuhan (Canada)
 Benjamin, Ellul, Illich (Classic critical technology
interests from Non North American perspective
 Manovich, Winner – Sample of US critical
technology
 Next week: Manovich, Gender and Technology
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CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
Huge field
 Every country has its contributors
 So many will not be studied: next week in
addition to gender and technology we will do a
brief survey of the many contributors
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ELLUL
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In a post war era, a technological optimism was
pervasive: one might think it inexplicable in view of
the destruction of the war – but one must remember
that the war was not in North America – and that
technology helped rebuild Europe
This optimism was united with the 1950’s and its
motifs of technologizing the domestic household
“Third” world countries – development was seen as
the key to world progress
Though Hiroshima and other technological fault lines
had well emerged – they were not allowed (for varied
reasons) to become culturally visible (Still not allowed
to be visible)
The cold war provided the drama, around which a
distraction could occur and technological competence
was reasserted as a answer
ELLUL
Ellul began his career concerned like many who
witnessed the rise of Hitler, and other fascist and
totalitarian regimes – with propaganda
 Ellul watched (and heard through the radio)
Hitler and Mussolini rise to power.
 He became concerned about how the state merges
with media.
 He became concerned about how the state wins
social approval by using social mechanisms
combined with media
 He watched as the Fascist leaders in Europe
demonstrated their comprehension of the
importance of every day rituals and also noneveryday rituals to this process
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ELLUL
Propaganda is key to helping a society give its
freedom away
 “This need of a certain cultural level to make
people susceptible to propaganda is best
understood if one looks at one of propaganda’s
most important devices, the manipulation of
symbols. The more an individual participates in
the society in which he lives, the more he will
cling to stereotyped symbols expressing collective
notions about the past and the future of his
group. The more stereotypes in a culture, the
easier it is to form public opinion, and the more
an individual participates in that culture, the
more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation
of these symbols.” From Propaganda (written
across his career and published finally in 1973)
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ELLUL
Propaganda is key to helping a society give its
freedom away
 Propaganda does not advertise this as it agenda
 Propaganda indeed seems to be very much about
something else than giving freedom away.
 Propaganda is very much about offering
optimism, and “copies” of freedom
 Propaganda is about symbolic exchanges based
on the culture of symbols that exist in a culture
 In our culture we are vulnerable symbolically to
the idea of progress, through technology, this has
replaced the sacred symbolic systems that once
unified western society and become the new
symbolic unifier, undergirding western social
order
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ELLUL
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Ellul uses this Hegelian dialectic to explore the way in which
technology seems to offer humankind progress but instead actualizes
its own form as progress,
The costs of technology is living with its forms
Living with these forms is presented as freedom
However this freedom when viewed from a macro angle – is not
actual freedom
Technology is free to develop (to progress)
Humanity is free to adapt to this technology
This adaptation has its costs, many of these are de-centered and de
marginalized (left to occur off screen, out of sight, worked by the
symbolic order – so they are not seen though they might be in view
Viewed on the small scale these costs seem marginal at the time,
Viewed from a macro angle – these cost can seem horrific, akin to
learning to live with in a leviathan
As Ellul lives across several “ages” – he can see the losses – the
freedoms that have been sacrificed with the advent of each new
technological arrival
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
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In the Technological Society, ELLUL’s classic work, Ellul uses
sociology to trace technology as phenomenon interpenetrating all
aspects of social life including work, and sees this as a means of
waking up society to the propaganda of our age.
He is especially concerned regards the relationship of human
freedom to its technology
He is dependent on Marx for this trace:
Marx was concerned to critic Hegel’s optimism regards historical
evolution and progress
He works to show how – though technology offers progress with
each progression technology because the “case” that we are living
in
Technology contains us in its forms – thus we must be realistic
about the “optimism” it offers in terms of freedom
We are inside a leviathan ,(Jonah and the whale) this is our
situation
Technology has its own order which is remarkably similar to
organic order – including its decay
Our hope in this has to do with being willing to be human more
than we are willing to be technology – it is a smaller hope than we
first thought, but perhaps more powerful in view of technologies
inevitable decays (another hope)
IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
Multi-national influence:
Austrian by birth: Serbian–
Croatian Jewish heritage,
multi-lingual in Serbian,
German, French, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi,
Latin, Greek
 Studies crystallography
 Some argue that his concept
of conviviality is a term that
has roots in all of his
languages including the way
in which crystals grow and
flourish
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IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
Influenced by scientist: Michael Polanyi and his
brother Karl Polyani a political economist
 Polanyi (s) Hungarian thinkers who emphasize
the social construction of knowledge:
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Absolute objectivity (objectivism) is a delusion
Knowledge is constructed through communal
conversations under conditions favorable to such
construction
Knowledge is socially nourished, this nourishment
included the multi-sensual human form and its
community of senses
Knowledge appears as disengaged from local
context but is always tacit – that is it is always
learned through processes that interact with the
contextual locus of the body and thus is localized
Tools as means of learning
IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
Also influenced by the socialist movements that
arise in the wake of Vatican II, in which the
priesthood becomes concerned with liberation
and the movement of “liberation theology”
 Liberation theology has many roots but arises in
South America as it responds to it colonial past:
 Marxist concern for the oppressed is connected
to the Moses story; in Liberation Theology there
is a concern to address the oppression and
poverty that is part of how many South
American countries have come to technology
 South America as battlefield for capitalism and
communism – in which both trap humans in
mechanics of industrialized poverty, and a
connected racism, and a propaganda war that
keeps this struggle from visiblizing
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IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi wrote it
(conviviality) into his epistemology. All
knowledge is rooted in “tacit coefficients.” Tacit
coefficients of knowledge are communally held
and nourished. Conviviality involves a real
communication on the inarticulate level, and
shared intellectual passion. Pure conviviality is
the cultivation of good fellowship, especially in
small groups, in joint activities. Language,
culture, and understanding move forward in the
context of conviviality.
 Illich applies this concept of conviviality to the
relationship of human dignity and society
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IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
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Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
The progress of science and professionalism are
convivial to technology – but not necessarily to
humanity
 Humanity needs conviviality to prosper – with
out it social order decays because it becomes
disconnected at root (deep) levels with human
meaning and with the relationship of human
meaning to social order and its possibilities
 This is evidenced in biological and chemical
order is which convivial order can be found
 Conviviality is a dimension with which to
critique a tool, technology or social development
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IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
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Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
Latin: “with” “life” – that bubbling that
has to do with irrigating life: water, blood- the oxygenization
processes that allow life to flourish, thrive, emerge
 Old idea of “gathered at table” – where conversation
emerges that can solve issues, imagine a positive future,
create something that irrigates human being.
 Freedom to create a thriving world vs freedom to create a
technologized world
 Conviviality and pain are connected – when conviviality is
sacrificed we are also distanced from human pain placed in
technologized relationships to it. Thus pain can be a way of
locating where it has been injured…
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IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
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Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
The epoch of system has replaced the epoch of instrumentality
The distance between the human and the tool is subsumed as
the system configures them as a dyad: the system incorporates
us and reconfigures us as its ideological body (a virtualized
body), this concept, an idea which becomes systematized,
absorbs us such that we can no longer step outside of our tools
to ground ourselves in our own body and world: the
perpetuation of disembodiment as virtual metaphor
Distances us from our capacity to comprehend misery and the
problem of human dignity – it is this comprehension that saves
us from our systems – pain works as a way to find “our body”
(however pain is technologized by the system in several ways –
especially as an image)
IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
 Latin: “with” “life” – that bubbling that
has to do with irrigating life:
 The epoch of system has replaced the epoch of
instrumentality
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The means of learning has been increasingly professionalized:
profession as a “the call” to say – to be what one could be –
each human has a certain dignity that surround work – as a
creative and passionate contribution to social order
Separation of this dignity from school as school becomes a
means to create system which subsumes human usefulness
in to human as tool used by this system
IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
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Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
The epoch of system has replaced the epoch of instrumentality
Instead of receiving human as convivial “gift” - the human is reordered through education to fit the technology the system
creates.
This becomes expoentialized:
as profession requires training, thus certificates become required
for work, and education becomes intrinsically consumed by an
order that is less and less available to all:
and also is increasingly frayed by it passage through the system in
its usefulness: examples: health care, child care
The propensity of capitalism is to turn education – into a means of
profiteering – that in order to “work” one must have certain
degrees and certificates – means that even education itself
becomes less about learning and more about “giving degrees and
certificates”
Education becomes disordered in relationship to its purpose – in
relationship to human conviviality
IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
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Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
The epoch of system has replaced conviviality as a
relationship between humans and tools in which creativity,
involvement, passion, conversation, collaboration, are
available as the conditions for creating society
 The replacement is marked by a certain lone-ness that
marks this age – a way in which priorities seem appointed
afoot and afar from what people seem to really identify as
priorities
 In particular “loneliness” itself is visible – but instead of
receiving convivial resolutions – is technologized as
resolvable through technologies – and thus made amenable
especially to solutions that position consumption over
community – substituting it in for conviviality.
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IVAN ILLICH (1926-2002)
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Illich’s concept of Conviviality:
The epoch of system has replaced conviviality as a
relationship between humans and tools in which creativity,
involvement, passion, conversation, collaboration, are
available as the conditions for creating society
 In particular “loneliness” itself is visible – but instead of
receiving convivial resolutions – is technologized as
resolvable through technologies – and thus made amenable
especially to solutions that position consumption over
community – substituting it in for conviviality.
 In terms of governments: the image of conviviality becomes
very important to affiliate with – conviviality becomes an
image to manipulate and promise while actual conviviality
becomes more ephemeral, promised but not actualized
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LANGDON WINNER
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Current scholar: Langdon Winner is Professor of
Political Science in the Department of Science
and Technology Studies at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York since 1990.
LANGDON WINNER
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In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody
social relations i.e. power.[2] To the question he poses
"Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two
ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first,
involving technical arrangements and social order,
concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement
of artifacts or the larger system becomes a
mechanism for settling the affairs of a community.
This way “transcends the simple categories of
‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ altogether, representing
“instances in which the very process of technical
development is so thoroughly biased in a particular
direction that it regularly produces results heralded
as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests
and crushing setbacks by others” (Winner, p. 25-6,
1999) as summarized by Winner in Wikipedia
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“Let's take the bank teller, the person sitting
behind the counter with little scraps of paper and
an adding machine and replace it with an ATM
accessible 24 hours a day. Let's take analog
recording and the vinyl LP and replace it with
the compact disc in which music is encoded as a
stream of digital bits. Or let's take the classroom
with the teacher, blackboard, books, and verbal
interchange and replace it with materials
presented in computer hardware and software
and call it "interactive learning". From
CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR
COMMUNITY
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“In case after case, the move to computerize and
digitize means that many preexisting cultural
forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their
former shape as they are retailored for
computerized expression. As new patterns
solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of
human relations that surrounds them are often
much different from what existed previously.
This process amounts to a vast, ongoing
experiment whose long term ramifications no one
fully comprehends.". From CYBERLIBERTARIAN
MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“In case after case, the move to computerize and
digitize means that many preexisting cultural
forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their
former shape as they are retailored for
computerized expression. As new patterns
solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of
human relations that surrounds them are often
much different from what existed previously.
This process amounts to a vast, ongoing
experiment whose long term ramifications no one
fully comprehends.". From CYBERLIBERTARIAN
MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“a widely popular ideology that dominates much
of today's discussion on networked computing. A
suitable name for this philosophy is
cyberlibertarianism, a collection of ideas that
links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically
mediated forms of living with radical, right wing
libertarian ideas about the proper definition of
freedom, social life, economics, and politics in the
years to come.” From CYBERLIBERTARIAN
MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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What is Cyberlibetarianism?
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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What is Cyberibertarianism?
Libertarianism makes freedom a priority image no matter
what
 Freedom is a mythology that is used by libertarians
 Freedom as relationship of choices to reality often remains
unexamined: Who is free? What is free? What is free to grow
remain relatively unprobed
 For most libertarians – it is capitalism that is free to grow
That this comes at the expense of other freedoms is often under
acknowledged
Cyberibertarianism: cyber should be free to grow no matter what:
Winner argues that libertarianism is already a myth – but when
paired with cyber becomes an especially powerful and
unstoppable phenomena (even this idea of unstoppable is
mythologized – we are portrayed as powerless in terms of its
progress)
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LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“The first and most central characteristic of
cyberlibertarian world view is what amounts to a whole
hearted embrace of technological determinism. This is not
the generalized determinism of earlier writings on
technology and culture, but one specifically tailored to the
arrival of the electronic technologies of the late twentieth
century. In harmony with the earlier determinist theories,
however, the cyberlibertarians hold that we are driven by
necessities that emerge from the development of the new
technology and from nowhere else.
One familiar expression is Alvin Toffler's openly
determinist wave theory of history. ”
From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE
PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
Influenced by Ellul and Illich, Winner argues that
such determinism must be met by a more through
version of this determinism –
 My translation : Winner seems to argue that it
must be shown to be really a version of
technological optimism in disguise
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LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“In this perspective, the dynamism of digital
technology is our true destiny. There is no time to
pause, reflect or ask for more influence in
shaping these developments. Enormous feats of
quick adaptation are required of all of us just to
respond to the requirements the new technology
casts upon us each day. In the writings of
cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the
challenge are the champions of the coming
millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the
dust.” From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE
PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY
LANGDON WINNER: THE PRESENCE
OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH ARTIFACT
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“In fact, increasingly popular among cyberlibertarians is the
conclusion that rapid development of artificial things
amounts to a kind of evolution that can be explained in
quasi-biological terms. As Kevin Kelly explains in his book
Out of Control "We should not be surprised that life, having
subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to
subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of
constant evolution, perpetual novelty, and an agenda out of
our control. Even without the control we must surrender, a
neo-biological technology is far more rewarding than a world
of clocks, gears, and predictable simplicity." (Kelly, 472) In
Kelly's view, the effort to engage in deliberative social choice
about technology can only be a destructive practice.”
From CYBERLIBERTARIAN MYTHSAND THE PROSPECTS FOR
COMMUNITY
NEXT WEEK:
Finish Langdon Winner
 Lev Manovich
 Donna Haraway
 Lynn Spigel
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