Art education and cyber-ideology: beyond individualism and technological determination

Beyond Individualism and Technological Determinism

In technological determinism, research and development have been assumed as self-generating. The new technologies are invented as it were in an independent sphere, and then create new societies or new human conditions. The view of symptomatic technology, similarly, assumes that research and development are self-generating, but in a more marginal way. What is discovered in the margin is then taken up and used.... These positions are so deeply established, in modern social thought, that it is very difficult to think beyond them.

- Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form(1)

Rethinking Technology

The alternative responses on which Raymond Williams based his account of the development and deployment of television, which he saw as a social phenomenon from its inception (in contrast to the usual understanding of it as an isolated technical capacity only subsequently given social and intellectual meaning), could valuably be applied within the current attempts to wrestle with the character and import of computer and Internet technologies. Williams concluded that television could properly be understood only if the phenomenon was recognized, at all stages of its development, as the practical outcome of already specific relations of production, distribution, and control in a particular society. It was necessary, for example, to talk of television's existence in the United States as a specific configuration of, say, technical facilities, knowledges, institutions, and ideologies. Only within a reductive "analytic abstraction" could something presupposed to be television's "pure technology" be extracted from actual historical and social circumstances and hence become seen as a putatively autonomous, self-sufficient, and "determining" entity. Williams saw such "technological determinism" and the slightly more complex form of explanation he called "symptomatic technology" - in which technical means and knowledges are teleologically seen as "made to order," solving preexisting economic, social, political, or military dilemmas - as blind alleys that confused, rather than clarified, the issues at stake. There is a salient contrast, then, between the theoretical implications of Williams's view of television and those of recent claims, for example, that computer and Internet technologies themselves herald the dawn of a new democratic epoch, or promise a "feminization" of global communication systems.(2) Although Williams had also been sanguine about the possibilities inherent within television and later new technologies, including the Internet, his skepticism centered on the likely development of techniques and technical applications controlled by institutions devoted primarily to economic profit or the maintenance of the political status quo.(3) A "technology" for Williams was precisely this: an institutionally embedded "way of doing and thinking," the managers of which, at every stage, could select or reject feasible developments of technique and application.(4)

According to his view, for instance, television in Britain and the United States had (or was) two distinct technologies: the former dominated by the British Broadcasting Corporation's "Reithian" notion of "public service" (John Reith was the first and, arguably, still the most influential director of the organization), and the latter by the interests of an oligopoly of commercial corporations. British television (including the BBC) has certainly been (further) Americanized since Williams's book was published in 1974, but the insights in his study came from time spent in California the previous year, which enabled the comparative analysis. Channel-hopping, shortened attention spans (the earlier forms of propensity to what are now called sound or vision bites), and all the other mental disorders put down to "the effects" of television were, Williams believed, much more the result of how the medium had been developed, controlled, and used than some inevitable consequence of the medium's claimed intrinsic technical features. Later, Williams would identify, and condemn, the values and interests of those attacking television as a form - both left and right, inside and outside the universities - whom he called the "cultural pessimists" and "technological determinists."(5)

The book on television was an empirical case study reliant on a general precept that Williams had developed in The Long Revolution, published thirteen years earlier. Here, Williams, arguing against Marxists and New Criticism adherents alike, claimed that society consisted of a set of interrelated systems (of nurture, of education and communication, of material production, of political decision), which were socially and materially inseparable. These systems were able to be proposed as distinct and then as formally or substantively autonomous only within forms of abstracting analysis, which worked to isolate a system or element of a system from the whole. For instance, Marxists, through this process, illicitly privileged what they called "economic" production, while cultural idealists performed a mechanistic inversion of this choice, extracting art ("communication") and claiming this as the chief expression, or value, of the whole. Both groups, according to Williams, were guilty of reductivism: