The Social Implications of Technology
|
But, for one who's had the courage to embark on a study of the social implications of technology, technologies are more than simple-minded embodiments of applied principles. In the words of Matt Ratto, Calit² fellow and a graduate student in the UCSD Communication Department, "In fact, technologies exist in the world as socially meaningful artifacts and are designed, developed, and used in ways that go beyond the rational laws we think of as 'scientific.'"
Ratto is concerned about this in the larger context of "complex literacy," that is, what are the skills and abilities people need to learn to be considered "literate" in today's world? "Obviously the three Rs are still very important," says Ratto, "but these days people also need to understand and use technology, not just as passive consumers but as active reinventers of the technological environment. They need to be able to reinvent practices around technological devices and methodologies, connect them in new ways, and, in a word, experiment."
Human beings have done this forever - and in a wide variety of domains, Ratto points out - but we don't tend to characterize such activities as reinvention. "A good cook," he says, "may lack some of the ingredients for a given recipe but can use his expertise and creativity to produce a tasty meal nonetheless." Equally, a jazz musician is able to experiment with standard tunes and themes to create something altogether new. So the real question is: What is this skill or ability these people have in common, and how do you foster it within a given domain or, perhaps more importantly, an academic setting?
Ratto credits a number of people for encouraging his academic explorations. "Chandra Mukerji, Geof Bowker, Robert Horwitz, and Yrjo Engestrom, my advisors at UCSD, have been very helpful. I've benefited from their expertise and advice." But, emblematic of Calit²'s multidisciplinary environment, Ratto points to additional faculty who have contributed significantly to his thought process: "I also want to thank the folks at Sixth College - Gabriele Wienhausen and Pat Neil, in particular. And the great conversations I've had with Bill Griswold in Computer Science and Engineering stand out, not to mention my collaborations with Leigh Star. I've learned in almost sixth years of graduate school that, while ideas are important, it's the integration and further development of them that is especially meaningful, and that's not something you can do alone."
Ratto, who spent time working as a software engineer before entering graduate school, chose software as the topic of study for his dissertation, specifically the Linux operating system. Linux, created by a loosely organized group of software developers, served as a good example due to the way, as Ratto says, "it blends traditional technology producer and user roles."
Many people see technology from one extreme perspective or another, says Ratto. One side claims that technologies are neutral objects that are informed by their immersion in a social context. The other claims that technologies are deterministic objects that enter into social relationships and actually change the outcome of the relationships. These perspectives have been battling each other for a long time.
To try to sort this out, Ratto relied on the American pragmatists and Russian cultural philosophers. What both groups shared was an understanding of the double world humans live in. "For example, Ilyenkov, a Soviet era philosopher, believed that all human action is simultaneously symbolic and productive," says Ratto. "That means that when humans do things, they have both communicative as well as pragmatically effective results. Both aspects are equally important. That was the starting point for my thesis work."
Following Ilyenkov, Ratto realized that the battle between socially and technologically determinist theories of technology was based on a desire to see human communicative activity (the "social") or materially productive activity (the "technological") as the foundation of social reality.
To overcome this dilemma, Ratto replaced the binary structure of social vs. technical with a trinary structure. Applying this theoretical insight to a framework for studying software, Ratto singled out three aspects of technology: Technology as symbolically representative, as influencing individual behavior, and as organizing social relations. These correspond to his three categories of software analysis, namely, software as text, conduct, and structure.
For example, Linux is not the only "free" UNIX derivative. In this category, Ratto points to examples such as FreeBSD, Minix, and the Free Software Foundation's GNU project, none of which has enjoyed the same success as Linux. "You can only understand the impact of Linux by understanding how all three aspects work together," explains Ratto.
One reason Linux has been so successful is tied to its symbolic power: It is a symbol of the societal benefits derived from free software activities, and it is the "totem" of anti-proprietary software activists. Users unhappy with other operating systems can make a "political statement" by adopting Linux. In this case, Linux acceptance becomes a manifestation of a certain stance on software development.
But Ratto also points out that consensus is not required for something to be symbolically important. "Linux has been used to represent the power of a libertarian software development effort as well as a socialist one," says Ratto. "Its power lies in the ongoing and socially meaningful conversation centered on Linux."
But Linux is also meaningful in terms of the way it affects individual human behavior. Linux, like all technologies, influences us to do certain activities over others. Technologies express and organize relationships between users and tasks both by selecting the kinds of tasks that can be done and by embedding specific ways to do these tasks. Ratto calls this "conduct" and interprets this both positively and negatively.
What makes a technology productive - whether it's a rake or a computer - is the way it enables people to delegate agency to the technology to accomplish something. Of course, delegation implies some loss of control, which is becoming an increasingly complicated issue with respect to information technology. For example, word processing programs allow you to write, but you delegate certain types of agency to them: You agree to write from left to right with a certain alphabet, use functional forms embedded in the program, check grammar and spelling using the syntactical rules and dictionary provided, and so forth.
"When I use a proprietary word processing program, I can allow it to do spell checking for me," says Ratto. "This frees me up to concentrate on other things, but it also means I'm dependent on the embedded speller the program has implemented, which may or may not adhere, for example, to some 'standard' I consider important, such as the Oxford English Dictionary."
One of the interesting questions, here, says Ratto, is who gets to make the decision about what gets delegated? Many users can negotiate with the application by turning options off, adding macros, and so forth. But at least an equal number don't have that complex literacy to do that.
What this really points up, says Ratto, is a kind of "digital divide." But he understands it in a more nuanced way than is typically represented in discussions and articles on the topic. Says Ratto, "There are really two digital divides." One is the divide between the producers of the technologies (whose designs control how the technology is used) and expert users. The other is between expert users and novice users who haven't developed the ability to control the technology.
"Consider the number of people who have a blinking 12 on their VCRs," says Ratto with a smile. "This underscores the reality that technology producers and expert users often assume that technologies are more negotiable than they really are." While Linux is often perceived as changeable by its users in more complex ways than proprietary programs, these changes require a kind of expert knowledge that relatively few users possess.
Finally, Linux also has aspects that affect group behavior. "In a sense," says Ratto, "how the different parts of Linux are coded to work together allows for a disconnected and diverse group of developers." However, Ratto warns that this didn't happen automatically but is instead the result of specific decisions on the part of Linux developers.
As part of the Calit² Education layer, Ratto is working on a related research project, called "Ecology of Knowledge," which is studying how undergraduate students are using PDAs at Sixth College. In this study, Ratto and colleagues have determined that people who are successful with PDAs had social groups engaging with them in understanding and using the PDAs. "As anti-intuitive as this may seem," says Ratto, "technology is most successful when it supports social-collective efforts, not individual needs."
Ratto describes a personal experience that brought this point home to him. He had a diesel 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia. Because it was so slow, Ratto decided to install a gas engine. "It was quite an adventure," he says and explains that his ability to get the job done was predicated on his ability to organize a social collective around him doing similar things. "It turns out that the real effort was less in learning what to do than in finding a community that could support my need to reinvent my car," he explains.
Ratto points to PDAs, such as are being used in Bill Griswold's Active Campus project, as currently being "very hard to reinvent" because they are appliances made for particular uses. "They are really Beta devices that people use tentatively," he says. "Users are afraid of playing with them in novel ways for fear of having to reboot or worse. What we've realized is that it's robustness that enables a technology to be reinvented because it gives the user the necessary confidence to experiment."
Griswold's project, which has been extended to Sixth College, has also inspired some creative ideas on curriculum development. One class being considered would be based on a short scenario about the future written by an award-winning science fiction writer. The course would literally be created in real time with students working in teams and with technologies to live out the scenario and determine one or more endings to the story. Students would be asked to complete the story by gathering data, experimenting with the technologies at hand, and developing a design to achieve a goal based on some pre-determined themes for the course.
Part of the goal of the proposed class, says Ratto, is to get students thinking about complex design issues. "Critical thinking may not cross domains," he says. "The more you learn to think critically in various domains, the more mentally agile you become. And, if you can get students to think critically about technology, they are likely to become more active users, reinforcing their ability to negotiate with the technologies in their environments. That's what we want to enable them to do."