Hi.
Welcome back.
Today in this segment what I would like to talk with the class about is about something
that's a little bit different than what we usually talk about when we talk about information
technology.
A lot of times when we talk about information technology we are thinking about the newest
gadget, the latest features that are available from technology companies, maybe the missteps
that companies have done or the blunders they have made.
Today I want to take a step back and I want to draw out some preconceived notions that
we might have about what the way forward looks like in technology.
I want to talk about this using the word narrative.
So, using the word narrative is a word that describes a story that we tell about visions
of the future.
You can use narratives about other things other than the future, but in the case of
technology we’re going to use narrative to talk about visions of the future because
the stories that we tell ourselves about what technology is doing, and how technology is
used, and what we’re going to do with technology, and what we’re hoping technology will bring
create a narrative or a story that helps us to position ourselves in history and in the
development of technology, and the critical thing that I want to think about is that it
helps us to make sense, it helps us to determine what’s progress?
What is the thing that makes sense for the future?
The things that help us to understand what makes sense for the future are things that
fit into our narrative or our story about what technology is doing.
There are always different narratives that are trying to be told that people are telling
about what technology is doing in order to fit their world view, in order to fit their
goals, in order to make sense of what’s happening around them.
There are a lot of different narratives.
Some of them may be contradictory meaning that some stories that people tell about what
technology is doing may not be compatible.
They may not actually both be able to exist at the same time, but that doesn’t necessarily
mean that they’re wrong.
You can imagine one vision of the future involves Microsoft releasing a particular kind of technology
first, and a different narrative of the future would have Google releasing that technology
first.
Those are two contradictory narratives that aren’t necessarily wrong, but they help
us to think about what’s going to happen in the future.
Some narratives about technology, where technologies come from and where it’s going are wrong.
They’re wrong because they don’t account for things that we actually can observe that
have happened and just are not in the line with data that we have showing pretty clear
trends about what the future is going to be like.
So, let’s think about some of the technological trends that we use and a lot of times aren’t
even really conscious of.
Let’s look at four of them.
The first one that I want to talk about is one that’s broadly called technological
determinism.
This book here by Smith and Marx talks a lot about it.
It's called "Does Technology Drive History?"
It talks a little bit about that.
Technological determinism, and I'll read the slide here, is a reductionist theory that
presumes that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure and
its cultural values.
The first major elaboration of technological determinism came from Karl Marx whose theoretical
framework was based upon the idea that changes in technology and productive technology are
the primary influence on the organization of social relations, and that social relations
and cultural practices ultimately revolve around the technological and economic base
of a society.
Marx's position has become embedded in contemporary society where the idea that fast-changing
technologies that alter human lives is all-pervasive.
So, to encapsulate the idea of technological determinism this is a story that we tell ourselves
about the way that technology functions, and what technological determinism would tell
us is that when technology is introduced it changed the way the world is going to function.
It’s often considered as being inevitable, that technology will come, that drones will
start delivering packages, that we will be voting through online computers, that we will
be wearing digital contact lenses, and that these things are inevitable and that there
is nothing that you can do to stop them.
They will change society, and in fact they are the things that changed society.
So, this is one way of thinking about technology.
It is a narrative.
There are some pretty clear ways in which it’s not correct though, yet historians
who have looked closely at where technologies really come from generally support the proposition
that technologies are not autonomous meaning they don’t come from nowhere, they’re
not necessarily going to change the world, but they are actually social products that
are susceptible to democratic controls.
There are ways in which we can control which technology gets introduced into our society.
We're not necessarily going to have to succumb to the which technology gets introduced.
The idea, the first narrative, the narrative of technological determinism says that technologies
are inevitable and inexorably change societies.
So, when I bring this up and with the other ones what I want you to understand this is
as is a way in which we talk about technology implicitly, that we say things about technology
that imply that we have no control over them, that they are coming no matter what and that
they are just something that we are going to have to deal with.
When we take a step back and we talk about this as a narrative we talk about it as technology
determinism.
A competing narrative, one that has similarities but is not the same, is one that was introduced
in 1990/1991 from an article in Scientific America called "The Computer for the 21st
Century."
This article has been very influential by a researcher named Mark Weiser, and he introduced
the idea of ubiquitous computing.
Ubiquitous computing is a narrative that says that computing is progressing in waves and
each wave is causing computing to be more deeply embedded in everyday life until that
computation is actually invisible and seamless.
So this is a different way of talking about technology.
It is similar to technological determinism, but not exactly the same.
The way that Weiser positioned this is kind of in three phases, but since I'm a computer
scientist when we count we start with zero, so I'm going to start with zero.
The zero wave, the beginning was in computerless computing.
This was in the 1930s and 1940s.
This is when people like Church and Turing were working with computers as theoretical
technology.
They were using math and mathematical tools in order to establish fundamental limits on
computability.
What you can do with computers and what you can't do with computers.
This is kind of where are today with quantum computing.
If you think about quantum computing they are largely theoretical technologies, and
yet there are people like Church and Turing today who are doing conceptual and mathematical
analysis of quantum computers to tell us what the future will be like when quantum computers
are built, if they are built.
Weiser's first wave of computing was really mainframe computing.
This was in the 1960s, the 1970s.
This is when we had massive computers, not very many of them, that were doing very simple
data processing but they were largely influential.
There are very few of them in the world and they were largely at big companies, universities,
national research laboraties where they were doing things like processing large amounts
of financial data, doing the mathematical and scientfic simulations.
The second wave of computing was desktop computing in the 1980s and 1990s.
This is when business applications were driving usage, when Microsoft became prominent.
When one computer per desk, at least at the office was the norm, and computers began to
be connected into intranets to a massive global network that we know of today at the Internet.
So, although we talked in previous lectures about the Internet starting in 1960, it wasn't
until 1980 or 1990 where the Internet started to make inroads into the business environment
in which desktop computers were located.
All of these computers in this wave were wired.
The third wave would be what Weiser described as ubiquitous computing, and remember this
is 1990 when he was making his predictions and he was looking forward to an age which
we would probably say started about he year 2000, maybe we would go a little bit further
into the future, 2007 with the release of the iPhone in which information creation,
access, and communication are really driving research as opposed to business.
In this case there are multiple computers per person, per environment.
Words like Wans, Lans, personal area networks, ad-hoc networking, and wireless computing
became prominent, and this is the first stage which we started seeing computes disappear.
Not in the sense that computers became physical invisible, but that our usage of computing
started to be independent of the interface that we were using.
We stopped paying attention to the fact that we were using computer and we started working
through them instead.
So, this is a narrative that said we started in the first wave one computer/many people,
in the second wave computers were one-to-one, and the third wave there are many computers
to one person.
So, this is a competing narrative, a second wave of thinking obout the progression of
information technology all the times.
IT helps us to understand what's happening.
It's compatible with technological determinism in many ways.
In a nutshell, it says that technologies are becoming more imbedded, more seamless and
more invisible and that this happens on waves