technological cultures

Asia Culture Forum 2006 /

Plenary Session: Culture & Technology

1

Technological Culture

A presentation to the Asia Cultural Forum 2006

Gwangju, Korea

by

J. Macgregor Wise / Arizona State University

I am very happy to be able to address the Asia Cultural Forum on the topic of culture and

technology, and I deeply thank the organizers of the conference, in particular Dr. Shin Dong Kim, for

inviting me to speak. In my remarks today I wish to discuss the idea of technological culture as a way of

thinking the relationship between culture and technology in particular contexts. We live in societies which

are rapidly transforming due, in part, to new technologies. The understanding of the relationship between

culture and technology is then quite important to understanding our contemporary world, no more so than

in the dynamic Asian context. One dimension of this forum is the topic of cultural interchange and the

role of technology, and I hope that my paper might raise some interesting questions for further discussion.

As my co-author, Jennifer Slack, and I wrote recently in our book, Culture and Technology: A Primer,

“When intelligent people understand the relationship between culture and technology, they can evaluate

the options and negotiate better choices.”

But when we usually speak of culture and technology, they are often considered separate

entities; technology and culture are different things. We see this separation in discussions about the

“impact” of a technology on culture, or the way a culture might “shape” a technology. The first of these is

technological determinism, the idea that technologies drive cultural and social change. The second is

cultural determinism, the idea that technologies are solely the product of culture, neutral objects there to

do our bidding; that is, that culture necessarily shapes not only the possibilities for technologies but those

technologies themselves. We also see this separation of culture and technology when we might consider

culture as a context in which technology is to be inserted. For example, we may look at the mobile phone

in the context of the family, or in the context of a modern industrialized city. This use of context assumes

that the technology in question, the mobile phone, can somehow be decontextualized. It also assumes that

culture is simply something in the background, something which can be considered later.

But what if we take a slightly more robust view of culture?

We take as fundamental Raymond Williams’ notions that culture is both “a whole way

of life” and “ordinary.” For Williams, culture consists of two interrelated processes. First, culture is

tradition: that is, the meanings, values, and artifacts that are handed down to us, that we learn (and

learn about) from families, churches, and schools. These include the works of art and expression that

are said to contain the values and worldview of a culture. In addition, culture is the work of

selection: the selecting, challenging, arranging, and living of these received artifacts and

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Plenary Session: Culture & Technology

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ideas in everyday life. Culture is the process whereby tradition is reconfigured…in historical

conditions of everyday life and everyday change. The particular shape manifested by the process at

a particular point in time is what Williams means by culture as “a whole way of life.”

To claim that “culture is ordinary” is to acknowledge that these cultural processes occur

within the variety of practices that constitute everyday life. (Slack & Wise, 2005, p. 4).

If we consider this idea that culture is a whole way of life, then we have to acknowledge that technology

is always already a part of everyday life: it’s there in the cars we drive, the pens we write with, the oven

in which we cook our food. Technology is not something separable from everyday life and it is not

separable from culture. My co-author and I propose the term technological culture as an alternative to the

phrase culture and technology; the latter phrase maintains the distinction between the two, while the

former begins to eradicate it. The study of technology and culture becomes the study of everyday life.

What shapes technological culture, in part, are the narratives we tell ourselves about it.

Narratives tell us what to pay attention to, what’s important in a situation, what the purpose of something

is. Most of the narratives that are told about contemporary culture feature technology as a key character, if

not the protagonist (and antagonist). What my co-author and I have done in our recent book is to retell

some of these narratives that have been told within the North American context, and in so doing we map a

group of key concepts through which technology and culture tend to be understood (currently and

historically) in the United States (in a way, we could call these conceptual narratives). These concepts

include Progress (the idea that technology necessarily makes society better), Convenience (the idea that

technology can help us overcome our physical limits), Determinism (the ideas that technology is either

the cause of cultural change or the effect of cultural change), and Control (the idea that technology aids us

in controlling society and the environment, and also the idea that we are ourselves controlled by our

technologies). But we also ask in this book what other narratives are being told, or could be told? What

are alternative concepts through which we might better understand technological culture? In our book we

propose the following: Causality, Agency, Articulation, Assemblage, Space, Identity, and Politics. I won’t

rehearse these all here, but want to give you the example of one, Agency, and how when we begin to tell

stories from its perspectives we generate new and hopefully interesting questions about technological

culture. I use it as an example of how we might shift our perspective on technological culture, and it is

this idea of shifting perspectives, of generating questions, that I hope might be useful to this Forum and

relevant to Asian cultural interchange and transformation. I will use as an example a topic already

discussed here, the proliferation of mobile communication and computing technologies.

So most discussions of the role of technology and culture get trapped in the dilemma of

determinism, both technological determinism and cultural determinism. Usually this dilemma is never

stated so starkly and most would argue that the answer is somewhere in between: there is a negotiation of

sorts between technological and cultural determinism. But if we want to follow the idea of technological

culture, separating out a typology of particular influences (this is a cultural influence, that is a

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technological one) seems to keep us trapped in the same old dialogues. So instead we need to consider

technological culture as a field of agency. Actor-network theory argues that we need to pay attention to

this dimension of agency: the agency that human actors exhibit when they interact with each other and

with objects in the world, and the agency that these objects (especially technologies) exhibit as they shape

the cultural context in which they function. Humans and non-humans form together in actor-networks

which exhibit their own agency. Agency in this case is the ability to shape the paths of humans and

nonhumans; it does not imply any sense of intention. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari argue that there are two types of agency (though these are not fully distinct): corporeal agency

(bodies working on bodies, which they refer to as technology) and incorporeal agency (a body influences

another body at a distance, through incorporeal means; they refer to this as language). Any social and

cultural space consists of both types of agency, stratified. Technology and language are then considered

like two strata, or layers, of cultural space. The particular relation between these strata (between

technology and language) at a historical moment determines how things get done, the possibilities for

agency at this historical conjuncture. This relation is also important to consider because western

modernity tends to valorize the incorporeal. Corporeal agency is certainly important to modernity:

consider the vast machines, buildings, and material infrastructure of the modern world, viewed as the

product of human agency. But modern technologies since the industrial revolution are also much more

powerful than physical humans, and so the shadow of modern technology is that it actually shapes and

determines the human, that we are slaves to the machine. Incorporeal agency is considered less

problematic in this way; it is seen as the ability to act at a distance, out of proportion to actual physicality.

Voting, for example, determines the structure of government and the laws and social regulation of the

land. It is through incorporeal agency that judgments are made: a defendant in a court of law is

pronounced “guilty” by a judge and becomes instantaneously a prisoner. The manipulative powers of the

mass media are another example of incorporeal agency.

The popular rise of the Internet and cyberspace in the 1990s was touted as an important

advancement in incorporeal agency: through the digital realm we would leave the limitations of the body

behind. The digital represented absolute power through language, the ability to create and influence the

entire world (and reality) simply through incorporeal means. It was seen as renewing the power of

democracy and freeing the human spirit. However, what the internet boom actually represented was an

increase in technological infrastructure and the growing power of quite corporeal machines, routers,

cables, and satellites. This is not to say that incorporeal agency did not transform and perhaps increase,

but that it was accompanied by a substantial transformation of the strata of technology (Wise, 1997).

But exploring the varied stratifications of agency only gets us so far; we need to understand the

accompanying territorializations of these assemblages of technology and language. That is, how is power

configured? How is agency distributed? Michel Foucault posited a model of power which he called

disciplinary, where both language and technology were structured so as to create a particular subject,

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normalized through discourse and subject to the material structures of modern institutions. Gilles Deleuze

argued that at the end of the 20th century we were moving away from a disciplinary society and towards a

society of control, one marked by the apparent dissolution of institutional boundaries and the penetration

of particular formations of technology and language into the interstices of everyday life with the

particular goal of constant control. Society was no longer just about the creation of productive citizens but

the constant shaping and reshaping of citizens. The society of control is based upon the very same shift in

the stratification of cultural space, one that proclaims to advocate freedom but enhances very real

structures of control. One dimension of contemporary societies of control is the ideology of

neoliberalism: society is about the production of autonomous individuals who are told that it is their task

to produce themselves. The self is a project with which they have been tasked, a project which is never

completed.

This theoretical interlude paints with broad brush some new perspectives from which to

approach any particular instance of technological culture: what is the distribution of agency and what type

of agency is there? But what then is a technology from this perspective? What is it that we study? To

answer this, bear with me a moment as I briefly prolong this theoretical turn. If technologies are part and

parcel of the processes of everyday life then they are not discrete entities, but collections of entities best

described as assemblages. Assemblage, drawn from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, is a concept

dealing with the play of contingency and structure, organization and change. An assemblage is a

collection of heterogeneous elements; it is not a set of predetermined parts put together in some

predictable order, nor is it a random collection of things. An assemblage is a grouping of things, the

relation among those things, the qualities they possess, and its effectivities, that is what it can do. To

understand a technology it is not enough to understand what it is, but what it can do.

Let’s take the example of a new portable video device, like the new video iPod. On the one

hand we have the usual elements: iPod, screen, software, hardware, earphones, ear, eye, hand, and so on.

Note that the assemblage iPod is more than just its physical components but includes its connections with

the attached human (just as it makes more sense to consider a car and driver as a car-driver assemblage

rather than as two separate entities; they function as one). So what’s important to note are the conjunction

of the elements, how they are put together and how once assembled they function differently: ear-and-

earplug is something different from ear and plug; in this assemblage, ear is becoming-plug and the plug is

becoming-ear. Besides noting the elements, there are other dimensions to this assemblage: its qualities,

affects, effectivity. So we start talking about grasping, attending, lightness, being cool, shining, becoming

private in public, and so on. And we talk about what this assemblage does: how it shapes the space around

it, transforms behavior, molds attention, distracts, focuses. The person attending to an iPod shapes their

body in gesture and attitude, their perceptual field bends as if towards points of gravity; they have their

own pattern of rest, speed and slowness.

But there is another strata to these assemblages as well, what Deleuze and Guattari call a

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Plenary Session: Culture & Technology

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collective assemblage of enunciation—discursive assemblages, jargon, nomenclature, the semiotic system

that turns a MP3 player into an iPod.

We enter assemblages locally: I pick up my mobile phone, sit down at the computer, scroll

through my email on my PDA. My body changes speed, path, and consistency. I enter into an assemblage

of language, which makes some statements possible and others not, and an assemblage of technology.

My contention here is this: if we are presented with new technologies, asked to enter into a

number of new technological assemblages, our way of acting in and relating to the world transforms.

How do we understand this transformation? Will the old stories of progress and convenience suffice?

What appeals will persuade us to take on these new ways of being in the world? How can we make the

best decisions we can about the world with which we are presented?

Let me give you an example. We are faced with a new technological assemblage, and it is not

just one or two new pieces of hardware or software but a whole array of developments which seem to

have the same functioning, which seem to be constructing similar possibilities for agency. This

assemblage is a combination of developments in mobile phone technology and pervasive computing. As

we enter into this assemblage, I argue that we are entering into what I wish to call “The clickable world,”

where we apply to everyday life the same means of relating as we do to computers. Everyday life is about

surfing and clicking, about a certain mobility and presumed control. At least, this is how these

technologies are being developed.

There are two aspects of this assemblage. On the one hand we have mobile communication

technologies. These include always-on interpersonal connections with others via voice and text on the

mobile phone, which leads to a near-constant co-presence with select others and places us experientially

in multiple locations at once. There are also an always-available array of mass media content such as

music streamed to mobile phones, television programs downloadable and viewable on iPods, and so on.

Plus with the spread of Wi-Fi there is the potential of an always-on Internet connection. Additional

functions are also built into these devices to make them “the remote controls for our world”: they become

our ID cards, allowing us entry into secure buildings, our transit pass, our credit card, allowing us to

purchase items from vending machines, and so on. At the same time the other aspect of this assemblage is

the distribution of computing power into everyday objects, what has been called ubiquitous computing,

ambient computing, or “everyware” (Greenfield, 2006), building smart houses and smart environments

designed to respond to us and provide us information and access. Adam Greenfield invokes this

assemblage like this:

In everyware, all the information we now look to our phones or Web browsers to

provide become accessible from just about anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a

manner appropriate to our location and context. In everyware, the garment, room and the street

become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots

are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And

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all the familiar rituals of daily life…are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves,

the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment (2006,

p. 1).

One of the earliest visions or statements of ubicomp is Mark Weiser’s influential 1991 essay in Scientific

American, “The Computer for the 21st Century.” In this essay, summarizing his innovative work at Xerox

PARC, Weiser wants computers to disappear—they distract from getting the job done. For example, for

some tasks you have to go over to a particular computer and focus on the screen, when much more in the

rhythm of everyday life would be simply picking up something which acted like scrap paper and jotting

down notes wherever you are. Computers don’t care where they are, but they should since it makes them

more useful if they understand the context of where they operate. As Weiser wrote, “Machines that fit the

human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing

as taking a walk in the woods.”

But how can computers disappear or become ubiquitous? Weiser uses the analogy of previous

technological “disappearances,” in particular the disappearance of written language. Once the domain of

specialists (craftsmen and artists who mixed ink, made paper, and knew the technicalities of writing),

written language was only found in particular places, usually chained to a shelf, and you had to travel to

where it was to access its knowledge (like having to go to where the mainframe or even desktop is to

access it). But now writing covers all surfaces practically, so much so that we do not notice it anymore;

it’s ubiquitous.

When computers disappear into the environment, Weiser says that the world will embody a

virtuality; the virtual realm of cyberspace will overlay the real world, not replace it. “Most of the

computers that participate in embodied virtuality will be invisible in fact as well as in metaphor. Already

computers in light switches, thermostats, stereos and ovens help to activate the world. These machines

and more will be interconnected in a ubiquitous network.”

From reading Weiser’s descriptions of ubicomp technologies and his scenario of a typical day in

the future in the world of ubicomp one can discern at least four key aspects of this technology. The first is

awareness: these devices are aware of their location, of changes in their environment, and of the identities

(and preferences) of the humans around them. The second is the flipside of the first: we are made more

visible by these computers: we are identified (through smart IDs, RFID chips, biometrics, and other

means) and tracked. Receptionists, bosses, colleagues, children, and parents know where you are at all

times (and they also known when you don’t want them to know). The third is predictiveness: the

computers become more helpful by guessing or anticipating what you want to do and staying one step

ahead. The computer may be correct in their guess, or may subtly steer you in to predictable patterns. The

fourth is the age-old promise of any communication technology: they will make the distance between

people disappear, they themselves will disappear, and we can reconnect once more (as if unmediated)

with others virtually anywhere. The idea of assemblage helps qualify the latter claim: the technology is

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always a part of the situation. A telephone and its connections shape the character and content of a

conversation even if you’re not aware of the switches or if you forget that you’re wearing a Bluetooth

headset.

Weiser is aware of the dangers of his scenario. Without strong privacy controls (including

cryptography) a ubicomp world has “the potential to make totalitarianism up to now seem like sheerest

anarchy.”

Awareness, visibility, prediction, and unmediated interpersonal connection become the

structuring principles of everyday life within ubicomp. Weiser’s vision has been enhanced by others

including his colleague Roy Want, Donald Norman, and others, including most recently Adam Greenfield.

Overall, it is a vision in which we are placed in complete (incorporeal) control of our world: it responds to

a click, a gesture, a glance, a word. It seems a triumph of human agency. But how to understand it so that

we can make the best choices about what to do? What we need are new stories to help us understand the

whole way of life of the clickable world. The idea of technological culture is a place to start, but what

next? What is the sense of that space of the clickable world? Who are we assumed to be and what are we

assumed to be like? What are we assumed to need? What does it feel like, that is what are its affective

dimensions? Is there comfort or fear under the surveillance of the clickable world? How are social

relations and assumptions about them (in other words, politics) structured into the devices and

architecture (and into the way it predicts and second-guesses us)? How is agency distributed here? Are we

so empowered if everything we do in the clickable world is tracked, recorded, compiled, and analyzed?

I present this paper as an aspect of my current thinking about culture and technology, about

technological culture. We are faced with the cultural challenge of a new assemblage of technologies

which have the potential to change completely how we act in the world. To understand this more fully, we

need to not get caught up with the particularities of the devices themselves, but with the broader plain of

culture and technology, technological culture. I think that it is quite important to understand the

specificities of the everyday life of technological culture, but it is crucial to understand the conceptual

narratives that are told which create, reinforce, and challenge technological cultures. By conceptual

narratives I mean the particular constellation of concepts at work at a particular time and place. These

will vary. Concepts have trajectories, vectors, and histories; they travel and transform. My recent work

has been an exercise in mapping these concepts in the North American context, but what brings me here

today to the Asia Culture Forum is that I think it vitally important that other maps be made. It is vitally

important that we explore how ideas of culture and technology are conceptualized many other cultural

contexts and what other conceptual constellations might accompany discourses of technology and culture.

For example, it has been argued that in India technology is articulated to Nation, Development, and

Science (see Prakash). In another example, Tetsuo Najita argues that the view that Japanese technology

and production is an expression of Japanese culture (a view prevalent in Japan but also picked up in the

west as a form of techno-orientalism,

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according to Morley and Robins), is a historical articulation of the post-Second World War era. Prior to

the Second World War, culture and technology were thought distinct: technology coming to mean western

industrialization and culture thought to be a shrinking premodern site for creativity and resistance to

technology. “However, we also have to map the trajectories of western (North American and European)

technology, science, and their accompanying philosophies across India, Japan, and the rest of the world

where…these can be read as forms of imperialism” (Wise, 2004).

By way of closing example, let’s consider the concept of ubicomp discussed earlier. When

ubicomp crosses Korean cultural space it becomes, among other things, U-Life, and becomes instantiated,

among other places, in New Songdo City. Songdo has been said to be both “a uniquely Korean idea”

(quoted in O’Connell, 2005) and a transnational, transcultural space of free trade and technological

innovation. What has been the trajectory of this concept of ubicomp? How does U-Life rearticulate

ubicomp in this context? What conceptual companions has it picked up along the way? Certainly

“development” is not one of these, and “progress” seems rarely mentioned. Gale International, who is

helping to build Songdo, uses terms like “value creation” and “possibility”; and the New York Times talks

of “technological prowess” and “foreign investment.” What then is the conceptual narrative map

underlying New Songdo? How is the concept of U-Life mobilized to promote economic investment? How

is it mobilized to provide a population’s affective investment? How is it understood on the ground, in the

day to day of life within Songdo? How is the concept articulated to a particular array of technologies and

architectures? What will the whole way of life, the structure of feeling (to use another phrase from

Raymond Williams) be like in Songdo? When we enter the assemblage which is everyday life within

Songdo, who are we asked to be? What are we asked to do? How are we asked to move, to speak, to

interact? What does it mean to be part of that assemblage, an actor in that network? When these

technologies fade into habit, become part of the background buzz just below our awareness, how will they

continue to structure our choices and possibilities, the particular type and character of everyday life that is

possible?

In other words, when considering the study of technological culture we can’t simply impose

conceptual frameworks from above, but need to understand the particular concepts which help structure

everyday life at a particular time and place, and the ways that these concepts are mobilized and

challenged in the very ordinary practices of the everyday.

References

Greenfield, A. (2006). Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Berkeley: New

Riders

Morley, D. & Robins, K. (1995). Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic. In Spaces of Identity:

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Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge.

Najita, T. (1989). On Culture and Technology in Postmodern Japan. In Miyoshi and Harootunian

(Eds.) Postmodernism and Japan. Durham, NC: Duke.

O’Connell, P.L. (2005, Oct. 5). Korea’s high-tech utopia, where everything is observed. New

York Times.

Prakash, G. (1999). Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton.

Slack, J. & Wise, J.M. (2005). Culture and Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, September. Pp. 94-

104.

Wise, J.M. (1997). Exploring Technology and Social Space. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Wise, J.M. (2004). Introduction: Technocultures. In Ackbar Abbas and John Erni (eds)

Internationalizing Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell.