THE INFORMATION SOCIETY: COMPUTOPIA, DYSTOPIA, MYOPIA

Y. Masuda, part of an Extract from The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society, World Future Society, Bethesda, MD, 1981 and 1983. Extract published as “Computopia” in T. Forester (ed.), The Information Technology Revolution, Blackwell, Oxford, 1985, p. 626.

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1984, p.xviii.

Thus the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Curriculum Committee on Information Systems, 1985, stressed the importance of developing curricula which widened the scope of computing-based and computer-related courses. Earlier reports in the 1970s had made similar recommendations.

The work of Roszak is one of the most notable examples of an attempt to express the ramifications of the counter culture, and particularly alludes to the role of technology. A more recent discussion, still echoing similar concerns, can be found in Athanasiou. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Faber, London, 1970; T Athanasiou, ‘High-tech alternativism: The case of the Community Memory Project’, Making Waves, Radical Science, 16, Free Association Books, London, 1985.

There are several useful collections of articles in this area. See A. Burns (ed.), The New Information Technology, Ellis Horwood, Chichester, Sussex, 1985; T Forester (ed.), The Microelectronics Revolution, Blackwell, Oxford, 1980; Forester, 1985, op. cit.; M. Shallis, The Silicon Idol: The Micro Revolution and Its Social Implications, Oxford University Press, London, 1984; C. Evans, The Mighty Micro, Coronet, Kent, 1979; Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow (eds), Compulsive Technology: Computers as Culture, Radical Science, 18, Free Association Books, London, 1985; and R.J. Boland and R.A. Hirscheim, Critical Issues in Information Systems Research, J. Wiley, Chichester, Sussex, 1987.

Enid Mumford, Values, Technology and Work, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1981.

D. McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1960.

The quote is taken from R. Boguslaw, The New Utopians, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1965; quoted in Mumford, op. cit., p. 61.

This influence has made itself felt both with academics and practitioners. The current trend towards adoption of standard forms of development methodologies for computer systems, including large mandatory elements of user consultation and involvement, is a result of the movement in which Mumford was and remains influential.

Mumford, op. cit., pp. 4–8.

Ideology can be defined as a masking of interests that is in some sense rational. Ideologies are systems of representation and as such part of the human material social process. For further elucidation of the concept see R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, London, 1977.

The collection of S. Macdonald, D. Lamberton and T. Mandeville (eds), The Trouble with Technology, Frances Pinter, London, 1983, covers many of the central issues, as do the articles in Solomonides and Levidow, op. cit. J. Becker, Information Technology and a New International Order, Chartwell Bratt, 1985 gives a geo-political slant.

See Solomonides and Levidow, op. cit., pp. 126–38.

Bell is credited with popluarising the term ‘post industrial society’ in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Heinemann, 1974. Although extensive reference is made to the work of Bell in this article, I am not seeking specifically to confront his work; but he has managed to convey a consistently held view, characterizing the technicism/instrumentalism which I seek to expose.

See, for example, D. Lamberton (ed.), Economics of Information and Knowledge, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1971; S. Macdonald, ‘Controlling the flow of high-technology information from the United States to the Soviet Union’, Minerva, 24, 1, 1986.

A recent publication concerned with some of these issues is Duncan Campbell and Steve Connor, On The Record, Joseph, London, 1986. See also BSSRS, Techno Cop New Police Technologies., Free Association Books, London, 1985.

The article by Rosenbrook et al., describes several similar sentiments with regard to the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. See Forester, 1985, op. cit., pp. 635–47.

C. Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War’, reprinted in Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973.

See Lasch, op. cit.; A. Bryant, The New Left in Britain, PhD Thesis, London University, 1980.

D. Bell, The End of Ideology: Essays on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas, Free Press, Glencoe, 1961, p. 408. Compare this with the quote from Boguslaw above. The latter would almost certainly have had the proponents of the end of ideology in mind when writing the book. The main target is, however, the related position that social problems are amenable to solutions in a fashion similar to that used by engineers to solve physical problems. The texts by Churchman and Checkland address these issues specifically: see C. W. Churchman, The Design of Inquiring Systems, Basic Books, New York, 1971; P.B. Checkland, Systems Thinking Systems Practice, J. Wiley, Chichester, Sussex, 1981.

A. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, Macmillan, London, 1976, p. 254. Thus even in its own terms, the End of Ideology was an ideology, let alone in the senses of the term analysed by Williams, op. cit., and others. See Gouldner, op. cit.; G. DiPalma, The Study of Conlict in Western Society, Morristown, 1973; and Bryant, op. cit.

D. Bell, ‘The “End of Ideology” in the Soviet Union?’, in M.M. Drachkovitch (ed.), Marxist Ideology in the Contemporary World, 1966.

C. W. Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, New Left Review, September-October, 1960, reprinted in I.L. Horowitz (ed.), Power, Politics and People: The Writings of C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967, p. 219.

Di Palma, op. cit., p. 3.

The key texts are C.A.R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Cape, London, 1956; J. K. Galbraith, The New industrial State, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 2nd ed., 1979; and A. Shonfield, Modern Capitalism, Oxford University Press, London, 1965.

An administration, moreover, whose ‘success’ is always to be paraded in statistical terms; a form of justification whose limitations are only now being widely exposed — after more than 8 years.

See, for example, K. Coates and R. Silburn, Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970; B. Abel-Smith and P. Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest, Bell, London, 1965.

The use of terms such as rationality and utopia has been replaced by ‘free market’, ‘privatisation’, ‘free enterprise’ among others. The tenor is, however, similar, as is the contradiction between ‘freedom of choice’, the market on the one hand, and the increasingly centralized and dominant role of the state on the other. Galbraith's arguments about private affluence and public squalor as stated in The Affluent Society seem possibly more applicable to the 1980s than they might have been to the 1950s and 1960s. His book is certainly well worth (re)reading in this context.

Originally published in 1963, the English translation appeared as a chapter in J. Habermas, Theory and Practice, Heinemann, London, 1974.

Practical power for Habermas concerns the choice between alternatives, technical power being concerned with efficiency: note that Habermas’ definition of practical power concerns “securing and expanding possibilities of mutual and self-understanding in the conduct of life” — see T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas, Hutchinson, London, 1978. This argument predates the current concern with effectiveness rather than merely efficiency. It also considerably extends the limited form of the distinction as it is stated above.

Churchman, op. cit.

Checkland, op. cit.

Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, Heinemann, London, 1971; Knowledge and Human Interests, Heinemann, London, 1972; and Theory and Practice, Heinemann, London, 1974.

H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964; Negations, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972.

J. Ellul, The Technological Society, Knopf, New York, 1964.

Habermas, 1971, p. 107. Similar sentiments can be found in the preface to the UK edition of Weizenbaum, op. cit. In this case the destructuring of the superego is characterised by the mentality engendered by a generation who have compulsively consumed computer/video games and their ilk. See pages xiii-xix — ‘Unsinn, Bloedsinn, Wahnsinn, … nonsense, stupidity, and insanity’.

McCarthy, op. cit., p. 23.

Habermas, 1974, pp. 8–9.

Ibid., p. 254.

Habermas, 1972, p. 314.

This is relevant even to what might be thought of as the straightforward technical realm. In communications for instance the 7 layer OSI model of communication can be seen as a representation of the objectified process of establishing and maintaining a link between source and destination; allowing a degree of prediction and control within the confines of those aspects of the communication act covered by the model. On the other hand, any implementation of such a link relies on aspects of communication which are not amenable to technical control, but instead rely upon a complex set of assumptions, inferences, and interpretations which can only be fully understood in the light of interpersonal and social factors relevant to the communication act itself. A concern with the former aspect is valid in itself until it encroaches upon facets of communication encompassed by the realm of interaction. It then becomes crucial in a practical sense (for successful, effective communication between people) as well as in a philosophical sense, that the distinction between ‘work’ (technical control) and ‘interaction’ (interpretation, convention, deviation) is recognised. The positions of Mumford and Habermas converge on this conclusion, albeit from different perspectives and with different aims.

Habermas, ‘What is universal pragmatics’, quoted in McCarthy, op. cit., p. 282.

For Habermas the overall task is to provide an account of communication that is both theoretical and normative: to show that a universal pragmatic competence exists which assumes undistorted communication, but which is not maintained or even achieved as a result of the distortions emanating from the practical realm. Moreover, anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they be vindicated or redeemed. These claims include those of comprehensibility, veridicality and applicability amongst others. A significant tension exists in the design and specification of computer systems, and it reflects these sorts of issues: comprehensibility, validity, completeness, veridicality, and so on. The term specification covers a wide range of activity and resulting documentation in the design process. It includes the original specification of the system requirements, possibly produced by users who are not computer-literate; also the term covers the detailed output presented to the programmers to transform into computer code in a specific language. There are, therefore, several steps involved in transforming the initial user requirements into the final software: each step involving the high probability of omission, or the introduction of misunderstanding, contradiction, and false assumption. The history of software design has been one of the production of systems which do not work, or do not fulfil user requirements, or are more cumbersome than the manual systems they were designed to replace. In order to respond to these sorts of problem, there have been moves in recent years to introduce more formal approaches to the design of software. One trend has been to introduce formal notations into the realm of specification in order that steps from one form of specification to another can be executed more rigorously with less chance of error and possibly detecting inconsistencies. These sorts of notation are based upon elements derived from discrete mathematics, particularly set theory, functions, boolean algebra. Unfortunately such notations are incomprehensible to almost all users, and indeed to most computer professionals; as such they require additional techniques to fulfil the requirements of comprehensibility, adequacy and applicability. Those who argue that rigorous formal notations are sufficient for the entire design process will merely propagate systems which are technically ‘correct’ and ‘verified’, but have no guarantee of fulfilling the functions required by the user community.

In certain contexts such suppositions may not be upheld, and in this case there is a move into what Habermas terms ‘discourse’. This move into discourse represents a break with the normal context of interaction. The validity claims that are unavoidably, if implicitly, raised with every act of communication and which are unavoidably accepted in ordinary interaction, are regarded as hypothetical and explicitly thematized. There is a willingness to suspend judgement, and to participate in the aim of reaching a ‘rational consensus’. Something akin to this occurs when a systems designer is introduced to a client organization. The designer, in attempting to understand the present system and requirements for a future system, must constantly seek far deeper levels of claim to validity for statements made by the organization's participants. This will then contribute to a greater depth of understanding of the key activities by both the designer as an outsider, and by the participants who may have taken a great deal for granted until forced to justify their activities in this way.