Initial thoughts on Langdon Winner’s “constitution” of sociotechnical order

Winner’s neo-luddite approaches to technology are quite refreshing as an antidote to the cyberbole of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, etc. I don’t think I agree with him, but his point of view is certainly worth airing. In the “Whale and the Reactor,” he proclaims: “Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation of a free society” (20). On pp. 95-6, he elaborates:

“Dreams of instant liberation from centralized social control have accompanied virtually every important new technological system introduced during the past century and a half. The emancipation proposed by decentralist philosophers as a deliberate goal requiring long, arduous social struggle has been upheld by technological optimists as a condition to be realized simply by adopting a new gadget. This strange mania ... is alive and well among those who celebrate the advent of the computer revolution.”

Given that these comments were made in 1986, when the net was limited to universities and the Web was yet to come, and thus before the explosion of Web2.0 type stuff, they will now seem either utterly prescient or slightly misguided, dependent on your attitude as to how revolutionary blogs, etc. are (i.e. luddite or technophile?). The answer, of course will lie somewhere in between, but for the moment, I just wanted to get down a few initial thoughts on some solid claims Winner makes on pp. 47-8 of that book, about the nature of the “distinctive institutional patterns” he sees as having been created by modern industrial production over the last couple of centuries. This “de facto ... constitution of sorts,” (a “sociotechnical order”) and the way it relates to relationship to concepts of “membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice,” is presented by the identification of five primary traits, and I wanted to examine each of these briefly (and only as a first pass!) in relation to the modern Web environment. Basically, the thinking is, that these are five testable claims about an established order, which if the current “revolution” is really revolutionary, should be substantially effected or transformed by this new technology.

1. The first of Winner’s claims is that “technologies of transportation and communication ... facilitate control over events from a single center or small number of centers. Largely unchecked by effective countervailing influences, there has been an extraordinary centralization of social control in large business corporations, bureaucracies, and the military. It has seemed an expedient, rational way of doing things. Without anyone having explicitly chosen it, dependency upon highly centralized organizations has gradually become a dominant social form.”

RESPONSE: Certainly the Web has assisted in the the production of information/comment outwith those established centres, promoting self-publication and new modes of political discussion. Wikipedia, which I do think is a truly wonderful example of the potential of this technology, opens the knowledge-base of the encyclopedia to anyone with a laptop, web browser and web connection, self-regulated by its own community. Political blogs allow scrutiny of events like the Rather controversy which the mainstream media might have glossed over (the potential effect of which is easily – and often – overstated, of course). But hasn’t the Web also been a source of further growth in the means of control of those pre-exisiting centres (I’m thinking of new means of government snooping introduced by legislation like the Patriot Act in the US), also the fact that Google, by being so important to the functioning of these distributed centres, has itself become a fearfully large central organization. Maybe the positioning of the centres is changing, the organizations evolving, but when we look at the current battle over the T&Cs of ownership of content currently raging around Facebook, we might wonder whether we are becoming more or less centralized...

2. Secondly, Winner identifies “a tendency for new devices and techniques to increase the most efficient or effective size of organized human associations. Over the past century more and more people have found themselves living and working within technology-based institutions that previous generations would have called gigantic. Justified by impressive economies of scale and, economies or not, always an expression of the power that accrues to very large organizations, this gigantism has become an accustomed feature in the material and social settings of everyday life.”

RESPONSE: The Web definitely does not buck this trend. From home-working, distance-learning, etc. (and regardless of the efficacy of these), we can see that the need for physical proximity to the organization is lessened, hence the number of people who can be subsumed into the organization is increased (at least potentially). Indeed, this ability to increase the efficiency and effective size of associations, is often cited as one of the most powerful aspects of the Web...

3. “Third is the way in which the rational arrangement of sociotechnical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchical authority. Legitimized by the felt need to do things in what seems to be the most efficient, productive way, human roles and relationships are structured in rule-guided patterns that involve taking orders and giving orders along an elaborate chain of command.”

RESPONSE: Here, using the Wikipedia example, we might on the face of it see an organization without a hierarchy, in the traditional sense – but who is actually adding to it? Certainly not most of the people who use it, so is there hierarchy there? Again, using the example of the political blogs, are they challenging the traditional power structures in a substantially different form from the traditional letter to the MP or Newspaper? Is the hierarchy of the working environment being changed through the use of collaborative media? Hmmm ...

4. “Fourth is the tendency of large, centralized, hierarchically arranged sociotechnical entities to crowd out and eliminate other varieties of human activity. Hence, industrial techniques eclipsed craftwork; technologies of modern agribusiness made small-scale farming all but impossible; high-speed transportation crowded out slower means of getting about. It is not merely that useful devices and techniques of earlier periods have been rendered extinct, but also that patterns of social existence and individual experience that employed these tools have vanished as living realities.”

RESPONSE: Well, firstly, email/blogging/social-networking has perhaps impacted on traditional forms of communication like letter, phone, etc. As a nice example, a friend of mine, Catriona, recently (4th March) posted a FB status wondering, “if facebook is really that great. whatever happened to picking up the phone?", to which another friend, Chris (5th March), responds with humour:

“That's a bit unfair to the old F-book, methinks... I mean, when was the last time YOU just rang somebody out of the blue?? These days, as I've come to understand it, that's just poor etiquette. It's kind of like complaining: "Whatever happened to sending carrier pigeons?" Answer: "It's just not the done thing anymore." I mean, confronted with a carrier pigeon--or a telephone call for that matter--I'm just not sure I'd know what to do!” [NOTE: I’ll check that it’s ok to use this with both people involved – if not, I’ll remove it].

But we are all still keeping in touch in some manner, aren't we?! And in McLuhan’s sense of “retrieval,” can’t we see the return of some features of communication that were lost in previous modes – for example, instant messaging and social networking is much more immediate than a letter, which retrieves some of the immediacy of face-to-face conversation which was lost while we were tethered to the letter as a primary means of written communication over distance. The Internet, in fact, remediates many media to retrieve some characteristics lost in their analogue modes (e.g., youtube is television but with the instant right to reply, broadcast becomes less one-directional). So I would probably assent that the Web does propagate this tendency in one sense, but in remediating so many other media, it perhaps retrieves more than it obsolesces. Further, I don’t think we’re led blindly into losing these “living realities,” I believe we accept losses and gains in a flux of negotiation based on costs and benefits to our primary concerns – to use the example of Paul Levinson in “Digital McLuhan,” the invention of the window to let light into buildings might have led to a loss of privacy, but we soon invented curtains!

5. Finally, in what has become a rather long posting, Winner advises as the fifth attribute of this de facto sociotechnical constitution: “the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations exercise power to control the social and political influences that ostensibly control them. Human needs, markets, and political institutions that might regulate technology-based systems are often subject to manipulation by those very systems.”

RESPONSE: Winner gives the example of advertising as one means by which organizations sway opinion to suit them, but we might also include lobby groups, etc. Here, the big corps of the Web and computing in general (Microsoft, Google, et al) certainly don’t seem any more averse to using these means to their own ends than traditional organizations. If we look at the content of the Web environment, though, does increased potential for public scrutinization of organizations and public-sphere conversation outside of traditional big mainstream media, increase the scope for us to recognize and react to these influences? Maybe ...