5 Things About Technological Change

A summary of:
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Presented at: The New Technologies and the Human Person: Communicating the Faith in the New Millennium. Denver, Colorado, March 27, 1998.

Postman makes 5 very important points about the nature of technological change, which are worth bearing in mind if one's aim is to make such changes. It also helps us reflect upon how we have been changed.

1) The first is similar to Newton's Third Law of Motion, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, perhaps not equal in this case; but the point is that technology is a trade-off, and perhaps aptly described by Postman as "a Faustian bargain". "Technology," he says, "giveth and technology taketh away." Consider things like some of our favorite labor/time-saving technologies - the vacuum cleaner, the microwave oven, the dishwasher. I'll take each in turn.

The Vacuum Cleaner: a device advertised since the 1950s as something that makes women’s work easier, relieving them from the burdens of taking the carpets outside and beating the dust out of them. Whereas before, this was usually a two-person job, now thanks to the vacuum cleaner, the woman should be able to do this on her own. The reality of this technology in the home is that, yes, the act of cleaning the carpets was made easier, but this only raised the expectations for women’s responsibilities around the house. And the vacuum cleaner was only one in a range of technologies aimed at women around this time ostensibly to make doing housework easier. As this trend continued through the decades, the effect of bringing these devices into the home was to make individual tasks easier, but to make the job of doing housework on the whole much bigger for women, i.e. their remit expanded to meet growing expectations about their ability to perform tasks in less time. The number of things a modern homemaker is now single-handedly responsible for far exceeds that of the pre-technological home, and these added pressures have been linked to increased rates of anxiety for the modern woman.

The Microwave Oven: also designed to save us time. Not only that, but it removes the need for expertise in the kitchen. Anyone can cook their own food. But while people can now cook their own meals, they cannot do so at the same time. This means that meals are no longer ready at the same time for all. People begin to get used to the notion of eating meals alone, when their own plate is ready. It sets the stage for families to eat separately, on trays in front of the television; rather than sitting down together to eat a meal and talk. Of course the microwave is not to blame for this trend all by itself. But the point is, while the microwave makes it easier to heat up meals, it also makes it easier for us to forgo the important social ritual of eating together, thus potentially weakening family bonds.

The Dishwasher: I have a similar critique of the dishwasher. Or it's a blend of the two above critiques. That it makes the job of washing the dishes a single-person job, thus removing opportunities for discussion and teamwork that was previously provided by dishwashing - one person washing, one drying. Now one person chucks the dishes in the dishwasher, and discussion need not occur at any point.

The thing Postman wants us to take away from this point is that, while we tend to ask, 'What will technology do?', it is equally important to ask, 'What will technology undo?'

2) Postman's second point is that "the advantages and disadvantages of new technology are never distributed evenly among the population." There are, in his words, winners and losers. The winners tend to be those whose business and/or lifestyle is most closely aligned with the values of technology, e.g. people who rely on information, speed, etc.. The losers are those who would never have asked for that technology in the first place, but of course no one would have asked them their opinion (because they need to be converted anyway, surely).

Postman asks: "But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, bricklayers, dentists, yes, theologians, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more than ever reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political institutions."

I think in many ways this is no different from Westernization/Colonization - there are winners and losers in that classic game. But the savages need to be civilized, no? They'll thank us later.

Because of this, Postman suggests we ought to question the motives of those that enthusiastically promote various technologies - not because they are evil, but because they will win; and they may not necessarily be thinking of how others might lose.

3) The third point is: "To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data."

And the important point for me is that the internet changes us. Carr says: "The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet's power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin our, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to 'DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.' The artificial intelligence we're creating may turn out to be our own" (Carr, 2008).

4) The point point is: "Technological change is not additive; it is ecological." This means, simply, that adding a technology into an environment changes that environment in a more complicated way than it being simply environment + technology. Of course, this is what makes the consequences of technological development so difficult to predict. One can never be certain of the unintended consequences of their development - hence the word, 'unintended'. But that does not absolve our responsibility! We must try the best we can to understand those environments we are designing for, as well as those we are not but may in turn become influenced by the technology, and try to figure out how the addition of a given technology will change those environments.

This, I suppose, is part of the design ethnographic mission.

5) And finally, Postman argues that, "media tend to become mythic," in the same sense he wrote about the mythologization of television in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. This is to say that we "[tend] to thin of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things."

I think this is another way of saying what Lanier warned about, which was Lock In. That we become unable to see any other possibility for the Internet, because it is starting to feel like this is exactly how it always should have been. This is The Internet.

I also think this is worrying: we tend not to question the quest of ubiquitous computing, which is basically that technology should pervade our lives to such an extent that we no longer recognize it as such. Essentially UbiComp aims for this mythologization... and need we ask why? Because those who make that technology will benefit from its proliferation. But again, who loses in this scenario?

Postman leaves us with this wise advice:

"What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God's plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us."