making things common…moving things around…

communication vs. information exchange vs."reading data"

• technological determinism– cause and effect mechanisms

• technological reductionism

• reification

• change – technological imperative?

• neutrality of technology– instrumentalism

• neutrality of media ? ? ?

neutral media technologies?

Kranzberg's First Law• Kranzberg’s First Law: Technology is neither good nor bad—nor is it

neutral. At the risk of spoiling its Zenlike nature, let me propose an interpretation: a technology isn’t inherently good or bad, but it will have an impact, which is why it’s not neutral. Almost every applied technology has a good side and a bad side. When you think of transportation technologies, do you think of how they enable a delightful vacation or get the family back together during the holidays—or do you think of traffic jams and pollution? Are books a source of wisdom and spirituality or a way to distribute pornography and hate? Do you applaud medical technology for curing plagues or deplore transportation technology for spreading them? Does encrypted e-mail keep honest people safe from criminals or criminals safe from the police? Are plastics durable conveniences or everlasting pollutants? Counterfeiting comes with money, obscene phone calls come with the telephone, spam comes with e-mail, and pornography comes with the Internet. Every law creates an outlaw.

• Edward Tenner, Future Hype, Technology Good or Bad, Why Things Bite Back (1996)

Jacques Ellul

• 'technique carries with it its own effects quite apart from how it is used... No matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences. This is not just a matter of intention'

• 'technical development is neither good, bad, nor neutral'

Ellul, Jacques (1990): The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans

Neil Postman• 'The uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the

technology itself' . . . The medium 'contains an ideological bias'

– (1) because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different media have different intellectual and emotional biases;

– (2) because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different media have different political biases;(3) because of their physical form, different media have different sensory biases;

– (4) because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different media have different social biases;

– (5) because of their technical and economic structure, different media have different content biases.

• the printing press, the computer, and television are not . . . simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information

Postman, Neil (1979): Teaching as a Conserving Activity. New York: Dell

Carroll Pursell

• 'the choice of means always carries consequences' which are not identical with the original purposes involved

• 'As the material manifestations of social relations, tools are concrete commitments to certain ways of doing things, and therefore certain ways of dividing power. It is a mistake to think that, like black and white marbles, the "good" and "bad" effects of technology can be sorted out and dealt with. In fact, one person's white marbles are another's black: labour saved is jobs destroyed... my loss is your gain' (ibid.). 'Technology remains a very human tool, used by some against others'

Pursell, Carroll (1994): White Heat. London: BBC

Lawrence Lessig

• code

• structure / architecture / layers

• HOW ABOUT REGULATION?

a manual loom

a Jacquard loom

a simple music box

street barrel organ player

Player piano

Conlon Nancarrow

Study no. 12

Gyorgy Ligeti

Vertige

Hungarian Rock

Herman Hollerith

The Hollerith punching machine and the ‘card reader’

The Hollerith reader and tabulator

Hollerith Tabulating Machines

• first used for 1890 census– saved the United States government five

million dollars for the 1890 census alone– helped complete the analysis of the data in

three months instead of the expected two years.

• Tabulating Machine Company

• German branch – Dehomag

Hollerith census machine

Objectification of individuals and their actions• Frederick Winslow Taylor

– Scientific Management - Taylorism– Efficiency Movement– "one best way to solve the problem"– deskilling of labour

• Henry Ford– Fordism

• process flow charts• time and motion study

– Lillian Evelyn Moller and Frank Gilbreth• elements of motion ("therbligs") -18 basic hand motions• bricklaying experiment: number of movements reduced from 18 to 5

Checking of items to ensure correct quality or quantity.Inspection                    

Longer-term storage of materials or other items. Storage                       

Idle time of people or machines, or temporary storage of materials. Delay               

Movement of people or things. May be accompanied by a distance measurement.

Transport                    

A complex action or process (possibly described elsewhere), often changing something.

Operation                    

MeaningNameSymbol

therbligs

Logic of the census

• the perfect census from which nothing about the community and individual can be hidden from the scrutinizing glaze of the authority

Logic of the census – Puritan way

• By walking with God, I mean, a sincere endeavour, punctually and precisely to manage, conduct, and dispose all our affairs, thoughts, words and deeds; all our behaviours, courses, carriage, and whole conversation, in reverence and fear, with humility and singleness of heart, as in the sight of an invisible God, under the perpetual presence of his all-seeing, glorious, pure eye; and by a comfortable consequent, to enjoy by the assistance and exercise of faith, an unutterable sweet communion, and humble familiarity with his holy majesty: In a word, to live in heaven upon earth. (Robert Bolton)

• Massachusstes Bay Colony – leader of colonial census taking• tithingmen• the "relation"

A Dehomag poster, the caption read “The Hollerith perforatated card reveals all”

What is information 'about'?

• “social imagination has always associated computing with surveillance” – computing has been perceived as a clear generalization of the methods of rational administration that had been “developed in organizational management throughout the modern era,”

• "information is treated as tangible, measurable substance, but only in a minimal sense does the information seem to be about anything,"

Philip Agre, “Beyond the Mirror World,” 39.