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.
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 of life” and “ordinary.” For Williams, culture consists of two interrelated tradition: that is, the meanings, values, and artifacts that learn about) from families, churches,
way
processes. First, culture is
are handed down to us, that we learn (and
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
Asia Culture Forum 2006 / Plenary Session: Culture & Technology
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ideas in everyday life. Culture is the process whereby tradition is conditions of everyday life and everyday change. The a particular point in time is what
reconfigured…in
historical
particular shape manifested by the process at
Williams means by culture as “a whole way of life.”
To claim that “culture is ordinary” is to acknowledge that these cultural processes within the variety of practices that constitute everyday life. (Slack & Wise,
occur
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 Asia Culture Forum 2006 / Plenary Session: Culture & Technology
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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, Asia Culture Forum 2006 / Plenary Session: Culture & Technology
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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-andearplug 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 Asia Culture Forum 2006 / 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 manner appropriate to our location and context. In everyware, the garment, become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects are reimagined as places where facts about the
room
and
in the
street
from shower stalls to coffee pots
world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And Asia Culture Forum 2006 /
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all the familiar rituals of the
daily life…are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves,
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 Asia Culture Forum 2006 / Plenary Session: Culture & Technology
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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, Asia Culture Forum 2006 / Plenary Session: Culture & Technology
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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: Asia Culture Forum 2006 / Plenary Session: Culture & Technology
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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. 94104. 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.
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