Fourteen: Media, Knowledge, and Technology
I got my first cell phone in December of 2000. I was halfway through my freshman year of college, and my friends and loved ones had sort of conspired to finally get me one because I was so hard to reach (it was my girlfriend at the time, to whom I am married today, who actually purchased the phone and gave it to me as a gift for Christmas). It was not until I sat down that January in a literature course and the professor instructed us to “silence your phones—I know everyone has one now, but I don’t want to hear yours go off during class” that I began to wonder: am I among the last to jump on the new technology bandwagon? I say this to draw attention to possible bias on my part: I am not, suffice it to say, a technology-forward person.
It is not that I have something against technology. I love working with computers, and have been doing so since I was a kid (which, by contrast with the present, was actually a weird hobby in the late 1980s). I was active on the Internet by the mid-1990s, when it was still a “wild west” of eccentric loners, before it became so centralized with social media, inundated with big-money advertising, and crowded with humans and bots. By contrast, a traditional-age college freshman today, the age I was when I got my first cell phone, you were born into post-Internet world. You may have never used a phone attached to a wall with a cord or placed a hand-written letter in the mail. You probably did not learn to write in cursive, and might be an avid reader without ever having set foot in an actual, physical bookstore. You may not “read” at all but listen to audiobooks instead. Rather than wood shop or machine shop classes in high school, you more likely took computer courses. Maybe you never bought a Compact Disc either. Before I start to feel old from waxing nostalgic, I am going somewhere with this: technology changes what we do, and how we do it. Technology also changes how we think, and what we think about.
We live in a “technofix society” in which problems have largely come to be reduced to, and viewed as, technical problems. Runaway climate change? Just change it back, or develop new, more efficient “green” technologies. Species going extinct due to human activity? Just grow new ones in a lab. Humans are already influencing our world in profound ways—as Duke environmental scholar Jedediah Purdy argues, via his 2015 book’s namesake, we are living After Nature, a world permanently changed by human activity. Though Purdy does not make the argument himself, someone could simply suggest (and many have): if we are living in a period “after nature,” why not simply accept it? Why not engineer the Anthropocene for the sake of human well-being, according to human designs?
Perhaps you do not consider the influence of technology in your everyday life. Lost? There’s an app to get you where you want to go. You can communicate almost instantly with people on the other side of the world, old friends, family, social movements, political officials…technology permeates every aspect of our lives. Even the study of “social problems” is touched by these distinctions: sociologist Richard Stivers (1999) asserts that we no longer inhabit a world governed wholly by meaning and common sense, but that even social problems, which have a moral element, are reduced to technical problems with technical solutions. Maybe all this suggests why I started this chapter with some self-reflection, reflexivity, because I knew this was a morally and politically charged topic and that my own point of view on it may bias me in certain ways.In the social sciences, I can either be reflexive, aware of how my own feelings and experiences shape the facts at hand, or I can try to be “objective” and risk conflating my experience, including my biases and blind spots, with something that’s true for everyone, everywhere.
Criticisms of the technological solution as taken-for-granted are not unique to our day or time. Indeed, Karl Marx was quite critical of the inhumanity and exploitation of the mechanized workplace in the mid-nineteenth century, referring to the factory, and the economic system, variously as a “monster,” a “vampire,” and a “were-wolf” (a play on the German word for Warenwelt, or “consumer world”). Marx was also famously critical of automation, the increasingly widespread use of machinery in manufacturing and production jobs that both threw people out of work and potentially made work more fast-paced, grueling, and dangerous for those who were employed. In the tradition of Marx’s work, but drawing upon somewhat different historical currents, critical theory developed in the context of the period following the Second World War. Though the thought of Karl Marx and those who have drawn upon his work are typically considered “leftist,” critical theory, broadly speaking, examines social forces and power relations that “lie behind” and structure modern culture. From this definition, criticisms of modern society that are both “left” and “right” leaning have been effectively leveled by people working in the critical theory tradition.
What united the first wave of critical theorists after WWII was their major research question: why did the Holocaust happen? Many of the early thinkers in this tradition were German Jewish intellectuals who fled Germany with the rise of Nazism. They organized what was called the Frankfurt School (oddly, in the United States) where they conducted both conceptual and empirical work to try to understand how the Holocaust happened. One current of this school of thought engaged in attempting to understand authority, specifically around the development of the concept of the authoritarian personality, a stable personality characteristic that makes people both more likely to follow, and to give, orders. Psychologists have long been interested in how authority works. One of the early examples of applied experiments in understanding authority is the now-infamous Milgram experiment, conducted at Yale University in the 1960s. In the experiment, a man was seated in a room, a “learner.” Electrodes were attached to the learner’s body that were supposed to deliver electric shocks of increasing intensity. On the other side of the room, a “teacher” was seated at a large console with switches marked with varying degrees of electric shock. The switches were marked anywhere from “mild shock” to “XXX—danger, severe shock.” During the experiment, scientists dressed in lab coats sat behind the teacher, urging the experiment to continue, in which the teacher asked the learner to match certain words and phrases, and in which the teacher doled out ever stronger shocks for each missed answer. The teachers sweated, became fidgety, even laughed nervously or hysterically as sounds of ever-increasing pain came from the learner, but, prompted to continue by stern-looking authority figures, the majority of these middle-class men from New Haven, Connecticut delivered shocks all the way into the “XXX” range, even after the learner had stopped screaming, or responding. The learner noted a heart condition at more than one point in the experiment. “The experiment must continue,” the scientists insisted. “It is urgent that you continue.” In reality, the “learner” was simply a recording. No one was really harmed, though the learners often admitting they were troubled in the aftermath of the study. Ultimately, this offered a window into human nature, into humanity. Obedience appears to be a deep-seated characteristic of human beings, as social animals. But as I mentioned, these people were not generally comfortable—they resisted, they became nervous, they felt for the learner. Human nature is a constant tension between obedience, doing what we are told whatever our personal reservation, and empathy, our capacity to sympathize with the feelings of other beings.
Unfortunately, this particular study seems to privilege obedience over empathy (and perhaps the history of our species bears this tendency out more often than not). The conclusion that many who participated in this experiment, or have written on it over time, is that the German people responsible for staffing the death camps and carrying out the mass exterminations were not exceptional. Human beings often follow orders, regardless of how we feel about them. And they were just following orders, as many would come to say in the aftermath. This is the first current of thought that is specifically relevant in this context. Understanding the human capacity to obey in such circumstances remains a focus of social scientists. A second related current is the Frankfurt School’s focus on technology as being “non-neutral.” That is, technology does not merely exist to serve the whims of those who construct and use (or do not use) it. Technology changes us. It changes how we relate to one another, how we conduct our affairs, how our society is structured.
A question I have been wrestling with since considering both the influences of this famous experiment alongside this perspective on technology: would the people in the Milgram experiment have reacted similarly if they had to see the learner, face-to-face? There are plenty of anecdotes about gang members and soldiers and their experiences when ordered to kill. Many who have found themselves in a position where they had to kill are permanently scarred by the experience. On the other hand, many of the most brutal events in history suggest that people are often quite capable of killing one another en masse, and sometimes with little real provocation, especially if ordered to do so by someone in power. A research question emerges, for which there is evidence of an affirmative answer: does technology create social and emotional distance, giving that human social tendency to obey more power, and that tendency to empathize, less?
Technology connects human beings together in many ways, not all of which are pleasant. Supply chains, or the number of people who interact with a product you own before it arrives in your possession, are global when it comes to technological devices in particular: the metals, particularly tantalum, tungsten, and tin, sometimes called “the three t’s”, are essential to the production of this computer on which I write this material. Sometimes, these materials are dug from the ground by children in slave labor, serving a warlord or militia in a perennially war-torn region such as some regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo. While we often think of areas rich in natural resources, particularly those that are fueling one of the largest vectors of economic prosperity in the world right now, it is tempting to think of such regions as unusually fortunate. More often than not, the resource curse is part of the problem that arises in such regions; conflicts can be funded by natural resources, and can last longer, and become bloodier.
These materials may find their way to electronics or other manufacturers, who may work in conditions that would be deemed hazardous or illegal by U.S. standards, sometimes for little compensation. International agencies have worked to curb human rights violations at each end of the supply chain, but such efforts are far from perfect. In this sense, a global society powered by technology, while generating a great deal of prosperity and comfort for many, has also generate new and stubborn social problems. The field of globalization, dedicated to understanding the relationships between human beings in different parts of the world in the context of a world-spanning economic system, develops such ideas further, but would take us far outside the context of the present study of American social problems since the mid-twentieth century.
On a lighter note, technology has changed how we communicate with each other: that much is obvious. Lives lived without writing involved different forms of communication. Writing gives me the ability to say something to you across space and time. As you read this, I am somewhere else. I may be asleep, out to dinner, walking my dog, or, perhaps more likely, reading and/or writing something else. This document might “outlive” me—I often read works written by people who are no longer with us. Their voices remain, inside my head, as a read their words (sounds a little creepy when I put it that way, yes?).
Sociologist Nicholas Carr has drawn attention to how new communications technologies have affected our brains, using neuroscience evidence to argue that reading information from a screen results in much shallower development of memory and learning. His work was, in many ways, years ahead of its time. Recent research shows that handwriting activates are far broader range of brain regions, strengthening memory and learning. The advent of “generative artificial intelligence” has raised new concerns, with consistent AI users being both even less mentally engaged than those dependent on Internet search engines and less able to identify misinformation. Further research draws attention to the fac that most educational technologies have not measurably improved learning, or have actually weakened it, as well as the possibility that educational technologies have both negatively affected learning and increased achievement gaps. Additional concerns about environmental impacts of emerging technology, from water usage to excessive heat produced by data centers to localized human impacts to automation creating vastly greater inequality by deskilling or replacing many middle-class jobs; there are also the applications in warfare, surveillance, and of course misinformation and disinformation, which can now be produced for virtually no cost. the stakes, it would seem, are enormous at present.
Technology changes how we relate to one another, how we think about the world, and how we see ourselves. Technology also shapes how we see the future, and what hopes, or fears, we place in technology are linked to the approach to social problems we are most likely to adopt. Maybe you, like, me, grew up thinking about how technology was going to change the world someday, how we would one day have flying cars and colonies on Mars and no one would die of cancer ever again. After almost three and a half decades on this planet, technology continues to surprise me. Today, there are those who argue that the next stage of humanity is already on the horizon. Broadly speaking, I refer here to transhumanism, a set of beliefs associated with human beings taking over the technological and biological development of our species. Transhumanists argue that breakthroughs in genetic engineering could cure diseases and could perhaps significantly—or even indefinitely—prolong the human life span. Others have argued that computing power will eventually come to match the sophistication of the human mind, a moment called the singularity, the point at which computer power will rival the capabilities of the human mind. Science fiction techno-optimists have long imagined that it may become possible for human beings to “download” our conscious minds into computer systems or other, more durable containers, to effectively live forever—though this is still in the realm of science fiction, I could say the same thing ten years ago about several technologies I’ve talked about in this book that are now closer to reality.
Second thoughts are easy to come by—we have all seen that science fiction movie (there are several, really) about artificial intelligence deciding human beings are too much of a bother and enslaving or exterminating us. Perhaps, if computers were sufficiently sophisticated that they could perform all the jobs we do today more efficiently than we can, we would be mere pets, provided food, shelter, and comfort but no longer essential to the ongoing function of the global economic system. These ideas may sound far-fetched, but some of the thinkers and entrepreneurs of our time are giving them serious thought. It is worth asking, too, considering where the natural resources for our gadgets might come from, or the conditions under which they might be assembled: who will benefit from these new technologies? Will the many be able to share in these techno-dreams, or only the fortunate few, and at the expense of the many?
We have come a long way from the earliest chapters of this work, zooming out ever farther to put our current moment in social space-time in context. There are woes and promises connected to the fruits of human ingenuity and scientific endeavor—I hope not to have suggested that technology is wholly “good” or “bad,” only that there are reasons to be optimistic, and skeptical, of the promises of this age. This age, I note, is called modernity, a term that literally means “now-ness” and a device by which human beings, social scientists and others, have come to divide the past from the present, and some ways of being in the world from others. Sociology as a discipline emerged to understand the problems of modernity.
Important Words
Authoritarian personality
Automation
Critical theory
Empathy
Globalization
Milgram experiment
Modernity
Obedience
Reflexivity
Resource curse
Singularity
Supply chain
Transhumanism
Sit With It: Big Questions
Note one technological development described in this chapter that you are familiar with, and have learned about before. How does learning about sociology over the course of this semester help you to see this technological development in a new light?
Do you tend to be more optimistic or pessimistic about technology, and has that changed after this part of the course? Why or why not?
