Untitled REPLY 2: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH OF TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY: AN OVERVIEW

Reply 2: An anthropological approach of technology and society: an overview

Stefan Köpsell, TUD, Germany 

Author’s background: Stefan Köpsell is a researcher at the University of Technology Dresden.

In her statement Daniela Cerqui tries to explain and discuss the development of technologies and its impact on society and vice versa, using an anthropological approach and perspective. She presents “two classical visions of technology”: technological neutralism and technological determinism. From the way it is presented, I got the impression that the usual way of understanding these terms is, that one has to decide which one of these two visions represents their own opinion and then stick to that decision. That means that one has to believe either in technological neutralism or determinism. Of course this strict categorisation does not make any sense. This is even realised by Daniela Cerqui, because she said that, “we find very often a mix of neutralism and determinism.” This is not surprising at all. One simple explanation is that the term ‘technology’ is too wide. It covers too many concepts, mechanisms, things, visions and understandings making it impossible to just use one of these concepts to explain the impact of technology. If one really wants to decide if ‘technological neutralism’ or ‘technological determinism’ applies to a certain technology, one has to specify very carefully to which specific technology one refers to. General propositions about technology at large are always very questionable. 

According to Cerqui, the ‘technological determinism’ can be further divided into ‘technophile determinism’ (technology will offer the right solutions for our problems) and ‘technophobe determinism’ (technology will lead us to a huge catastrophe). Again I got the impression that the usual way of thinking is, that one decides for one concept or the other. But I personally think that technology is at the moment the only feasible approach which offers (or has to offer and hopefully will offer) the right solutions for our problems - and, yes, it will lead us to a huge catastrophe. For me it is very similar to life in general, which finally always leads to a big catastrophe - namely: death. But does this imply that one should stop living?

Cerqui gives as an example for the mix of the concepts behind ‘neutralism’ and ‘determinism’ the “World Summit on the Information Society”. She explained, that “most positions during the meetings assumed that we have no choice (determinism)”. It stays unclear that ‘no choice’ means; no choice for or against what? Does it mean, that we have no choice that our society is heading towards what is called ‘information society’, does it mean that we have no choice how information is used or abused, does it mean that we have no choice that the ‘information society’ will lead us to a huge ‘global digital divide’? For all these possible ‘no choice’ options one can easily argue that we in fact have a choice - and moreover that technology is the enabling thing that gives us these choices. The ‘use or abuse’ of information can be influenced by privacy-enhancing technologies (i.e. by technologies which prevent or control the very existence of information) or by technologies related to digital rights management (i.e. technologies which control the usage of information); the ‘digital divide’ can be overcome by technologies which support the idea of open access to open content for everybody (like the “One Laptop per Child” initiative, free and open source software and the Internet itself etc.). Once again general statements with respect to ‘choice’ or ‘no choice’ related to a broad field of technologies like information and communication technologies do not seem to be very fruitful. And the statement, explaining the position of the ‘technological neutralism’, which says that “we have to do the right things, if we want to reach the right goal” is so a general truth that any discussion is useless.

One of Cerqui’s fundamental questions (or criticism, as I understand it) is the fact that people (or the society at large) tend to “take[…] for granted that technology does exist, and we ‘just’ have to assess it consequences”. Inversion of her statement implies that she assumed that technology does not just exist. Before discussing if technology just exists or not, one has to clarify the meaning of the term ‘exist’ in this context. There are at least two different interpretations: ‘exist’ could refer to the awareness of the humankind for a certain technology, i.e. that people know how the technology works and prototypes and products for this technology do have a physical implementation. The other interpretation of ‘exist’ is a more metaphoric one: technology (or maybe more precise: the possibilities for and the concepts of a certain technology) ‘exists’ even without the existence of an individual, who is aware of this technology (i.e. knows about it). In this latter sense the ‘development’ or ‘creation’ of new technology will not really create something new (i.e. something which is not already there) - it is more a discovering process, i.e. a process which makes certain people or the public at large aware of that technology. So for instance for me the technology of a ‘car’ always existed, even if the concept was written down only some hundred years ago. Moreover even physical representations of technology may exist, even if nobody realises that it exists; just think of a stone which existed some billion years before the first humans used it as a tool or even as a weapon. All of our current technology is directly derived from the laws of nature. So if one believes that these laws of nature apply forever, i.e. without a beginning or an end, why should technology not exist in much the same way?

If one believes that technology ‘just exists’ then ethical or maybe anthropological issues related to the question, if one should ‘develop’ a certain technology or not, just melt down to the question, if on should make the public aware of certain technology. Now one can easily draw parallels to the discussion in the filed of ICT security. All of the ICT systems in use today have security holes and weaknesses. The main question is, if and how this should be made public. One party argues that security weaknesses have to be kept secret until the developers and operators have a chance to fix them; while the others argue that the security weaknesses should be published immediately to inform the public about the risks and to allow everybody to react accordingly. Applied to the field of technology the question arises, if one should develop (i.e. make the public aware of) a potentially harmful technology without knowing how to ‘fix’ it, or not? At least in the field of security it seems that it is widely agreed that ‘security by obscurity’ will lead to nothing than insecurity. But in the area of general technology the “avoiding technology (risks) by obscurity” approach seems to be widely adopted.  

Summarising the said and responding to the statements from Daniela Cerqui: Yes, technology just exists and the only thing one can do is to assess its consequences. Doing this, the “avoiding technology (risks) by obscurity” does not seem to be very fruitful and will possibly lead to nothing but just a huge catastrophe. 

Cerqui continues that “those who produce new technologies are at least as responsible as the users”. I do not agree with this statement. I do not refuse a general responsibility of persons who make the general public aware of certain technology and make this technology available for them. But I do not agree that this person has more responsibilities than the person who actually uses the technology. This would make life much too easy for people who are not willing to take over responsibilities for their own life and what they are doing. Imagine for instance a murderer who argues that he is not solely responsible for what he has done, because the ‘inventor’ and producer of the knife are much more responsible for the homicide the murder has done. 

Other interesting questions Cerqui poses are: “What we develop these technologies for? What is the ultimate goal? Why do we want them? What implicit project for society and humankind are they part of?” Especially the third question “Why do we want them?” implies that the main goal of developing technology is to have them after the developing has finished successfully. But to my understanding this is not always the ultimate goal of developing new technologies. In many cases it seems that “the way is the goal”, i.e. that technology is developed just because we can or we want to find out if we can or not. So the ultimate goal is the process not the product. Whether a certain technology is useful or not does not matter. Moreover it is very often impossible to predict, if a certain development would be useful or not. There exist many examples, where inventions of the paste reveal there whole potential only in our days. 

Cerqui said that “our western society has clearly chosen a technologically mediated way of living.” I just want to question, how we ‘chose’ this technologically mediated way of living? Was it an informed decision, a silent agreement, some kind of consensus? Or did we in the end not really ‘chose’ this way of living - because what we did was just not to vote against it?  

Cerqui also stated that “we are convinced that there is no other option” (with respect to the technologically mediated way of living). At least I am not convinced and I also do not want to spread it all over the world. I just see the “technologically mediated way of living” as one option of how to live - and it is an option I like. 

Cerqui draws the conclusion that in our new ‘information society’ the keyword for success is: access. “And the quicker access, the better.” Even so ‘access’ might be a precondition for being successful in an ‘information society’, but it is by no means the central point. The central point might be processing of information and gaining useful knowledge. I do not see a clear relation between ‘access to information’ and ‘gaining of knowledge’. Especially one does not imply the other. For me it is questionable if getting access to more and more information in an ever faster way will really lead to more useful knowledge and those successes. Moreover it seems more realistic that the over stimulation with information will hide any useful knowledge. So probably not the one who has the most information but the one who has the fewest will be successful. Applied to our today’s situation this means that not the one who gets the most SPAM is the successful one, but the one who has the best SPAM filter. Another way of reasoning about the success in the information society is the amount of attention one can get from others. The more attention one is able to get from others, the more successful one would be in the information society. And this has already started: just look at Google, You Tube or Second Life. 

Cerqui then cited Virilio. According to him “the history of humankind has seen three major revolutions that points towards an ever-increasing speed in getting in touch with the world. The first one – in transportation, [..] the second revolution – that of transmission or communication [..] and the third revolution – that of transplantation [..].” For me this looks much like the typical naive approaches of “creating fancy looking categories by three minute thinking”. Especially the relationship between the first and the second one is very questionable, because it says that communication allows things to be done faster compared to the case where one would be required to move oneself. But what if techniques like teleportation, materialisation or similar techniques become reality one day? In this case the distinction made above is not true anymore. Also I can not really see the relation of the third ‘revolution’ with the other ones.  

When it comes to privacy and information technology Cerqui argued that “IT must by definition be transparent” and that “we cannot have both”: free flow of information and privacy. The assumption that “IT must be transparent” is probably one of the biggest ICT related misconceptions. Of course ICT has to be designed in a usable and accessible way. But this does by no means imply that ICT has to be ‘transparent’. Moreover in many cases ‘transparency’ is contradictory to usability. Just to give an example of that I mean: If we look at cars then clearly a car user does not need to know all the details about how the car is working. Nevertheless he needs to have some basic understanding of the overall functionality, i.e. he needs to know the very basics about the functionality of the engine. Otherwise (in case of ‘technology transparency’) it would be very hard to ‘teach’ the user that he has to drive from time to time to obscure looking buildings, where he has to put in some strange looking device into his care. I am quite sure that in case of ‘technology transparency’ dozens of non working cars will lay on the edge of the road, just because they are out of fuel. Applying this to ICT it means, that we should not go for ‘total transparency’ but instead should teach the people the necessary basics of the ICT functionality and this way make them aware of potential problems. 

Regarding the question, if “we cannot have both of them”, one has to say that the distinction between “the information must circulate without any boundaries and everybody can access everything in real time” and “our privacy to be preserved” is much too much black and white. There are many shades of grey in between. First of all not everybody needs access to every information all the time without any boundaries. One simply has to carefully design and decide who needs access to which information, for which purpose, for how long etc. The development of privacy-enhancing technologies will enable to implement decisions. 

Summarising the said, we always have a choice in which direction our society wants to go, technology will support our decisions and technicians should design the new technologies in a way that these new technologies are intrinsically more good than bad.