THE SOCIAL CHICKEN AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL EGG: EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING AN THE TECHNOLOGY/SOCIETY DIVIDE

THE SOCIAL CHICKEN AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL EGG: EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING AND

THE TECHNOLOGY/SOCIETY DIVIDE Hank Bromlcy

Center for Educational Resources and Technologies State University of New York a t Buffalo

Seeing simultaneously yet lfferently is more easily done by two people than one, but ... one person can get the hang of it with time and effort.’

A large number of stories have been told about computers and schools, based on widely varying assumptions.2 In some, learning is assumed to be an individual process, readily accomplished by an isolated student in the company of a computer, with teachers “freed” from the tasks of presenting and testing basic information, and knowledge a quantifiable commodity students absorb in measurable chunks; in others, knowledge is assumed to be an evolving, multi-faceted social phenomenon, and learning a communal activity. Some stories rely on a consensus view of society, positing a single cultural inheritance that may be unprobleniatically agreed to as the essential content of schooling, and transmitted via computer, in everyone’s shared best interests; others see decidedly conflicting interests at play in the world, and propose using computer technology as a tool in efforts to maneuver within these adversarial relations.

This essay is concerned with another kind of assumption embedded in such stories, regarding the place of technology in social change. Consider this pair of statements:

All culture can be coded so that it can be operated on with digital computers.. ..We have crossed the frontier and initiated irreversibly a sequence of developments that will take a long time to complete, in which the cultural potentialities of these technologies are tried and tested. Some can regret the change, but they cannot reverse it; and others.. .can welcome it and work to fulfill it?

To adolescent eyes, one of the many characteristics that distinguish males from females is that males use computers. Young girls see boys in the video arcades and men in the TV computer ads .... In school, girls see boys flocking to the computer room whenever they have time .... It is threatening to ignore the rules that dictate proper behavior for each sex; teenagers run the risk of alienating their friends, all of whom appear to obey the rules scrupulously. This is why simply

1. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Prcss, 1991 ), 150.

2. For a comprehensive analysis of the different kinds of stories told about computers and schools, and their various consequences, see the work of Mary Rryson and Suzanne de Castell, who Initiated the use o f narratology in the area of educational technology; for instance, Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell, “Telling Tales out of School: Modernist, Critical, and Postmodern ‘True Stories’ about Educational Computing,” [ournal ofEducationa1 Computing Research 10 (1994): 191-213. Arevisedversion will appcar in Hank Bromley and Michael W. Apple, eds., EducationlTechnology/Power: Educational Computing as a Social Practice (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming).

3 . Robert 0. McClintock, “Marking the Second Frontier,” Teachers College Record 89, no. 3 [Spring 1988), 351.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Winter 1997/ Volume 47 / Number 1 0 1997 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

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making the computer equally available to each sex doesn’t work .... The minus of accepting the invitation - entering what they perceive as a male domain and therefore ... running the risk of losing their friends - can easily outweigh the p1us.l

In Robert McClintock’s comments, technology is depictedas anirresistible force beyond human control. Like a flood, technological development is unstoppable, washing the rest of society along in the changes it produces. Jo Shuchat Sanders and Antonia Stone’s observations suggest a rather different understanding. Here the impact of a new technology depends on the preexisting social conditions where it is introduced, not simply on the attributes of the technology itself. In a society where technical resources are concentrated in the hands of men (and boys), with a culture of exclusivity having developed at sites where those resources are used, new technologies are most likely to be appropriated for continued male use. In this view, rather than simply impinging on society from the outside, technologies follow a course determined by a deep entanglement with the social.

Given the variation in stories that could be told, does it matter which ones are told? Why should we care?

Pressure to place computers in schools has arisen from several directions, including the business community, professional educators, and parents. For all of these groups, a computer-based curriculum serves as a symbol of the quality of the education children are receiving. But just what the symbol represents is a disputed matter. I hope to intervene in that dispute over what to read in the-computer-as- symbol. The way we describe any phenomenon, the stories we tell about it, shape what we do and do not see in it. Some stories highlight social dynamics obscured by other stories. If one’s project is to help equalize the distribution of power in society, stories that illuminate the workings of oppression are essential. Stories which ignore, or downplay, the role of conflict and difference in history imply that what is good for the most visible members of society is good for everyone (as all of us purportedly have interests that are primarily shared), and thereby provide support - not necessarily intentional - for efforts to maintain that group’s position of privilege. It is important to ask what such stories omit (and therefore imply is nonexistent or insignificant), and what assumptions must be accepted in order to see the world in such a way. What, for instance, must one first assume about the uniformity across all social groups of what counts as knowledge and which knowledge is most worth having, before one could prophesy, as McClintock does, the ready acceptance of programmed instruction based on a digital encoding of “our” cultural inheritance?

Among the many kinds of assumptions carried by stories about computers and schools, one set has especially wide implications, and has been especially conten-

4. Jo Shuchat Sanders and Antonia Stone, The Neuter Computer: Computers for Girls and boy.^ (New York: Neal-Schuman, 1986), 13-14.

HANK BROMLEY is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Organization, Administration, and Policy and Associate Director at the Center for Educational Resources and Technologies at State University of New York at Buffalo, 217 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260. His primary areas of scholarship are the politics of technology, education and social change, and feminist theory.

BKOMLEY SOCIAL CHICKEN ANU TECHNOLOGICAL EGG 53

tious among those who write about technology: what relationship does technology have to the rest of social life? As we will see, how one answers that question goes a long way toward delimiting what one sees as the sphere of possible action for policymaking, for pedagogical practice, and for political action (as well as for technology creation, although that is not my main concern here). And because the stories spun by academic commentators have a way of seeping into popular con- sciousness, it is worth taking a close look at the theoretical debates on the relationship between technology and society, as the positions taken there have implications for what actions are seen as possible in tales of technology with wider currency.5

“GREAT TASTE” OR “LESS FILLING”: WHERE DOES TECHNOLOGICAL Bus RESIDE?

This section offers a typology of ways the relationship between technology and the rest of society has been conceptualized. The different positions delineated here each supply a piece of a larger picture, but rather than a mutual acknowledgment of each other’s insights, a recognition of possible compatibility among the different views, what has happened for the most part has been a disagreement at the level of “great taste” vs. “less filling.’’ In this case, the battle is instead between “technologies are intrinsically biased” and “what matters is how they are used,” but with no less resistance to the notion that both could be true. I will contend that drawing a false distinction between technology and society is what leads to this fruitless debate. Claims of exceptionalism on the part of technology, that it is somehow not a social phenomenon, are misleading. It is just as much integrated into social processes as any other human activity. In malting technology the subject of my writing, I am in no way professing that it is different or special; in fact, it is precisely because technology is like other social activities that a close look of this sort is called for.

Since my own path among the theoretical positions has at times mimicked the course of the broader debate, recapitulating my path offers a convenient way to survey the field.

Much writing about technology in general (and educational computing in particular) emphasizes the power of the technology to influence what happens in social settings such as the classroom. Often, guided by an abiding faith in the essential beneficence of technology, such accounts wax eloquent about the won- drous future computers are sure to bring us as we enter the “information age”: universal access to limitless volumes of information, lifelong learning independent of formal schooling, readily established networks of like-minded persons, and so

5. An excellent bibliography of readings in technology studies, selected with an eye to feminist concerns, is Maureen Ebben and Maria Mastronardi, ”Women and Information Technology: An Annotated Bibliography,” in Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship, ed. H. Jeanie Taylor, Cheris Kramarae, and Maureen Ebben (Urbana, Ill.: Center for Advanced Study, 19Y3), in which they list some 250 works, with commentary on each. Shorter lists focused more specifically on women and computers are available on the Internet at ftp://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/gender.bihlio (compiled by Leslie Regan-Shade) and at the end of the document http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/bawit.cfp93 (compiled by the group Bay Area Women in Telecommunications).

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forth, all contributing to decentralization of political control and empowerment of the individual. More occasionally, we hear from critics guided by faith in the essential malevolence of technology, who spin equally vivid tales of a dystopian computer-sponsored future, featuring homogenization, regimentation, and universal surveillance.

In either case, the outcome is attributed to the characteristics of the technology itself, and is presumed to be more or less the same everywhere the technology is in use. This is an ahistorical position, ignoring how the impact of a given technology varies with the specificities of different times and places, with what is transpiring where the technology is used: who is deciding how to apply the technology, and what are their objectives? What other agendas does the technology become attached to? Both these approaches amount to technological determinism, that is, they attribute to technology an overwhelming power to control human events. Technology is presented as an autonomous juggernaut, with each new development an inevitable result of what has come before, regardless of what the people designing, promoting, purchasing, or using the technology may have in mind. Whether advanced by the enthusiasts or the critics, technological determinism is - in addition to being historically inaccurate - a disempowering stance, as it implies anything we do in an effort to control the path of technological development and its impact on society will be futile.

Criticism of technological determinism is hardly new. Indeed, a well-established body of such literature has been developing for decades, with contributions from across the disciplines.6 But this line of work has had remarkably little impact within education, and especially within the field of educational technology, which continues to be dominated by an idealized view of science and technology long since abandoned by scientists themselves. Technologically determinist accounts of educational computing remain distressingly pervasive.

My frustration with the field increasingly convinced me that what was needed was consideration of the context of use, the social and political setting of the classrooms into which computers are introduced. How do preexisting social dynamics shape the eventual results, as the new technology gets swept up into its users‘ pursuit of their prior goals? How do actors in educational settings employ the computer according to their present needs in ongoing struggles among competing interest groups? My concern was that dropping a powerful artifact like the computer into schools was only likely to further the advantage of the already privileged, as they would be in the best position to make use of it.

Overemphasis on the context of use, however, can lead to another problem: viewing the technology as a “neutral” tool, whose impact is wholly determined by the intent of its users. Recognizing the significance of the context of use, the responsiveness of technologies to social dynamics, is a useful insight, but technologies are not infinitely malleable; they cannot be put to absolutely any end at will, and

6. These threads were perhaps first pulled together comprehensively in Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as (1 Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977).

BROMLEY SOCIAL CHICKEN AND TECHNOLOGICAL EGG 55

certainly not with equal ease. But once you refuse the determinist position, there is a tendency to fall into the neutralist camp, and deny that technologies carry any intrinsic bias at all.

I believe this either/or mentality, this seeming forced choice between the two mutually incompatible positions of technological determinism and technological neutralism, is unnecessary and fostered by a false distinction between technology and society. Viewing “technology“ as a separate entity, distinct from “society,” really leaves only two options for how to think of technology’s impact on society: either technology affects society or it does not. If it does, technology must be some autonomous, external influence on society, carrying its own intrinsic bias; if it does not, then technology must be neutral, and all that matters is how it is used.

A great deal of opposition to the neutrality position has been voiced by social critics of technology. A 1983 essay by Corlann Gee Bush is one example that has been widely cited by feminists. In it, she argues that while technologies may be tools, no tool is neutral. All have built-in propensities to be used in certain ways, toward certain ends.

To believe that technologies are neutral tools subject only to the motives and morals of the user is to miss completely their collective significance. Tools and technologies have what I can only describe as valence, a bias or ”charge” analogous to that of atoms that have lost or gained electrons through ionization. A particular technological system, even an individual tool, has a tendency to interact in similar situations in identifiable and predictable ways. In other words, particular tools or technologies tend to be favored in certain situations, tend to perform in a predictable manner in these situations, and tend to bend other interactions to them. Valence tends to seek out or fit in with certain social norms and to ignore or disturb others.’

In my own reflections on educational computing, I have also found certain tendencies to reappear wherever computers are used, certain predispositions that seem to come with the machinery, independently of who is using it and why. So if technologies are not neutral, do not come as blank slates to be freely written on by their users, what alternative is there to the determinist position that views them as an autonomous, external influence on society? A third position, a variation of the “intrinsic bias” position, holds that while technologies do indeed carry bias, they are nonetheless not autonomous; they carry bias precisely because they are influenced by the surrounding society in the course of being designed. The norms prevailing in the context of a technology’s development shape it so as to perpetuate those norms. It then, in turn, has an active role in affecting the social situations where it is used (as in technological determinism), but its power to do so is derivative, is borrowed from the social arrangements in effect at its site of development (in contrast to technological determinism). Schematically, this position replaces an understanding that looks like tech + soc, with soc

Critics of technology tend to adopt either this position, focusing on the context of development, or the position accentuating the context of use. In her cogent overview of the issues involved in a feminist analysis of technology, Judy Wajcman refers to these two positions as the “social shaping” approach and the ”use/abuse”

tech + SOC.

7. Corlann Gee Bush, “Women and the Assessment of Technology,” in Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, ed. Joan Rothschild /New York: Pergamon Press, 1983), 154-55.

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model.8 Both have the virtue of attributing ultimate responsibility for the impact of a technology to one or another social context -to the power relations, institutional structures, cultural norms, or human decisions operative at either the site of its development or of its use - rather than to technology-as-an-autonomous-agent. But ardent disagreement persists between proponents of the two views.

In looking at the usage and impact of any technology already in existence, the social shaping approach highlights the residue of past social relations, now residing within the technological artifact, what David Noble calls “hardened history, frozen fragments of human and social endea~or . “~ This bias now exists in the technology, placed there by the design process. From the perspective of the use/abuse model, given its concern with the influence of the context of use, ascribing so large a role to bias “in” the technology looks like technological determinism. The argument returns to whether “technologies are intrinsically biased“ or “what matters is how they are used. ” The social shaping model, unlike determinism, traces the “intrinsic” bias back to a prior social context (the design context), but that is not obvious - particularly to partisans of the use/abuse model - when comparing analyses of already developed technologies.

From the perspective of the social shaping approach, given the cyclical nature of its soc 4 tech + SOC understanding, asking whether bias exists in technology or in society is akin to asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. From this perspective, bias can obviously be found in both, and sequentially passes from one to the other.

The use/abuse and social shaping approaches are compatible (as I will attempt to show below), yet the dispute persists. One reason the dissension has continued unabated may be the abundance of examples that one or the other side can appeal to for support. In his essay “DO Artifacts Have Politics!” Langdon Winner offers several quintessential examples of social shaping. In one, the technological artifact in question is the regional transportation network around New York City developed by Robert Moses earlier this century. Winner credits “Moses’ social class bias and racial prejudice” for such features as deliberately low overpasses on parkways to Long Island, restricting access to public areas like Jones Beach to those (mainly white and middle-class) with their own private cars, and obstructing those who rely on public buses. Here is one technology with a designed-in bias that endures as long as the artifact does:

For generations after Moses’ death.. .his public works.. .will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the landscape. As New Yorkplanner Lee Koppleman told [Moses’biographer].. .“The old son of a gun had made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways.”“’

8. Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology IUniversity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

9. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History o f Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), xi.

10. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 23.


On the other hand, the use/abuse model is supported by examples like this one, movingly expressed in a speech by novelist Bruce Sterling:

The Internet we makesomuchof today-theglobalInternet which has helpedscholars so much, where free speech is flourishing as never before in history - the Internet was a Cold War military project. It was designed for purposes of military communication in a United States devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike. Originally, the Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid. And look at it now. No one really planned it this way. Its users made the Internet that way, because they had the courage to use the network to support their own values, to bend the technology to their own purposes. To serve their own liberty. Their own convenience, their own amusement, even their own idle pleasure. When I look at the Internet ... I see something astounding and delightful. It’s as if some grim fallout shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade had come out.”

As Sterling observes, the rigid intentions of designers and implementers notwith- standing, “the future is unwritten” - at least for those privileged enough to have electronic access to this particular form of Mardi Gras.

With anecdotal support of this sort, it is understandable that a rift should open between those who observe the constraints technologies place on their own use and those who celebrate the ways technologies are turned to unintended uses, and equally understandable that the dispute should become couched as whether bias resides “in the technology” or “in society.” Equivalent conflicts on related questions have also developed, with each side aligned with either the social shaping approach or the use/abuse model. Should we, for instance, focus our activism on changing who controls technology, or on changing technology itself? Wajcman phrases the question as “whether the problem lies in men’s domination of technology, or whether the technology is in some sense inherently patriarchal. If women were in control, would they apply technology to more benign ends!“12 An equivalent question is raised by Audre Lorde’s well-known statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”13

But, as I have suggested, the apparent depth of the disagreement is due to restricting our view to the present. For those technologies already in existence, the social shaping and use/abuse perspectives do stress different considerations, with the social shapingapproach attending to what has been built into the technology, and the use/abuse perspective attending to the variability in how it is used. It is possible, however, to combine the strengths of both perspectives if we broaden our view and, rather than look at a snapshot of the situation at the time an already developed technology is put into use, look at its course over time. Recall that the social shaping approach is named for tracing technological bias back to a prior social context, the design context. Over the full span of a technology’s life cycle, these two perspectives both attribute responsibility for the outcome to social factors, to human actions taken at the site of either the technology’s development or its use. While an approach

11. Bruce Sterling, speech delivered at the National Academy of Sciences, Convocation on Technology and Education, Washington DC, 10 May 1993. See Computer Underground Digest 5, no. 54 (21 July 1993). The full issue is at http://sun.soci.niu.edu/-cudigest/CUDS5/cudSS4.txt

12. Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, 13.

13. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches [Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 19841, 110-13.

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that treated technology as an autonomous agent would clearly be incompatible with either of these, we ought to be able to utilize the insights of both, if only we can avoid setting the two social contexts against each other.

As the anecdotal arguments suggest, significant influences arise from both contexts. Neglecting either leads to serious deficiencies in comprehending technology and its effects. On the one hand, we need to look at who is using a technological artifact and why (as recommended by the use/abuse model), what concerns those people have and how they are likely to utilize any new technology to address them; otherwise we risk assuming a given artifact will have the same effects everywhere, in all situations. On the other hand, we need to be aware of what a technology brings with it into all situations (as recommended by the social shaping approach), what norms built into it by its designers constrain its use; otherwise we risk seeing the artifact as a neutral tool amenable to any use at all. And we need to do both more or less simultaneously. As Patricia Williams notes (see the epigraph at the beginning of this essay), keeping both these views in mind at the same time is difficult, especially for any one person. So how are we to do it?

One tool that may be helpful (and which, as a “technology,” comes with its built- in limitations, like any other) is an analytical model. Since the two competing perspectives each assert the falsity of the other, if I am to borrow from both I need a way to sidestep their logical incompatibility. Having a single mental picture that at least includes a place for both sets of social influences may assist. I offer such a picture in Figure 1, with the intent of accommodating both perspectives.

1 r---------------------------- (A) previous technology - ---, 1

v I A . I

(C) new technology I

I

I

1

I

(B) social determinants 2 , (E) social impact . I

(D) social determinants 2 I I

context of development I context of use L--------- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -~

Figure 1: model of technology-society interaction

I begin by distinguishing, for any given technology, the context of its development from the context of its use.14Doing so allows us toview a technology’s life cycle longitudinally, making room for the concerns of both the social shaping and use/ abuse approaches.

14. I am borrowing here from Corlann Gee Bush again. She additionally defines an “environmental” and a ”cultural” context, which I have folded into the first two.


Each of the two contexts has two “inputs” -a technological one and a social one -and one “output.” In the developmental context, the technological input (A) is the body of preexisting science and technology drawn on to create the new technology; the social input (B) is the set of power relations, institutional structures, cultural norms, and human decisions that get built into the new technology. The output of the developmental context, the new technology (C), serves as the technological input in the context of use, and the social input there (D) is the set of social determinants - analogous to those at (B) in the context of development - influencing how the technology is used. The output of the context of use (E) is the set of social impacts of the new technology.

Each of the positions discussed above (technological determinism; use/abuse; social shaping) correspond to one of the three pathways through the model. Techno- logical determinism matches the A -+ C + E pathway: it maintains that new technologies arise as a natural consequence of existing ones, with little social control of the course of development, and that the impact of new technologies is again a consequence of the features of the technology itself, with the outcome largely insusceptible to human control. The use/abuse model corresponds to the entirely non-overlapping D -+ E pathway: the technology itself is neutral, and does not constrain the uses to which it may be put; the outcome depends solely on the social conditions where the technology is used. And the social shaping approach conforms to the B + C + E pathway: it highlights the social factors influencing the design of a new technology, and shares with technological determinism a concern with the biases the artifact then carries into the social setting where it is used.

In principle, there is no reason these various pathways cannot co-exist in a single model. Rather than argue over whether this factor or that one is determining, we could agree that all exercise some influence, with their relative significance varying in a contingent manner from case to case. And occasionally, some commentator does speak in such terms (see below for a few examples). But in general, there is a strong tendency for the various factors to be set against one another; the proponents of each pathway often interpret consideration of any other pathway as exclusion of their own favorite, and denigrate the alternative as “wrong.”

As I said initially, the model I am proposing could facilitate co-existence of the different perspectives, but there are limits to what its use is likely to accomplish. The problem is that by separating ”technical” and “social” influences in each context, it maintains exactly the distinction I criticized above between “technology” and “society,” lending support to the bad habit of thinking of technology as an external influence on society. This shortcoming is partly mitigated by the model’s indicating mutual influence between technology and society - in a repetitive cycle, as the social conditions resulting from the introduction of one technology form the setting for the development of the next - but it nonetheless retains a representation (however nuanced) of the two as strictly distinct, interacting only through specifically defined avenues, rendering it necessary still to meet Williams’s challenge of “seeing simultaneously yet differently,” since the moments of interaction are depicted as occurring in separate locations, and it remains all too easy to apprehend them as competing explanations.

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This billiard-ball type of model, with narrowly defined interactions among discrete entities, obviously has its drawbacks, sometimes guiding our thinking in not entirely productive directions. But what is the alternative? A homogeneous model, where everything is part of everything else, and mutual influence is effective everywhere at once, may be less misleading, but at the cost of offering little guidance altogether in trying to understand a concrete case: how do you proceed, where do you look first? My somewhat mechanistic model at least indicates specific points of interest, even though it leaves us the problem of how to integrate analysis of the several critical points without setting them against one another.

Such a problem is hardly unique to study of technology and society. Analogous, and strongly parallel, problems of accommodating two valuable yet apparently contradictory viewpoints are common in many areas of academic theory. The structure/agency debate in social theory is a prime example. Very much as in the argument over whether technologies are inherently biased or all that matters is how they are used, there is one side emphasizing the constraints placed on human action by some impersonal entity, and another side emphasizing people’s freedom to make what they will of a situation - and both sides of the debate treat any acknowledgment of the validity of the other side’s concerns as a denial of their own. Anyone who points out the obduracy of structural constraint risks being called ahistorical, fatalistic, and worse; anyone who points out the dogged recurrence of human defiance risks being called unrealistic, romantic, idealistic, and worse.

In much the same vein, critical studies in education swung for a decade or so between “reproduction, ” arguing that schools act systematically so as to perpetuate the status quo, and “resistance,” arguing that participants in educational institutions regularly find ways to thwart the reproductive process.Ii The field of women’s history has gone through similar stagesL6 Policy sociologists clash over whether public policies should be thought of as imposed by the state, or as resulting from a “policy cycle” of negotiation among all involved parties. l 7 Literary theorists have divided into those who seek meaning in the text itself and those who view meaning as constructed by readers. Karl Marx’s famous dictum that people make their own history, but under conditions not of their choosing, is another response to this same theoretical quandary.

Why raise all these examples from such disparate fields? For one thing, writers often argue for understanding technology a certain way by drawing analogies to these comparable debates. A more important reason to consider these related examples from other fields is that they may provide some clues as to how to cope with the challenge of ”seeing simultaneously yet differently” in our own area. Those who

15. See Michael W. Apple, Education and Power (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), chap. 1, for a recap of this progression.

16. One instructive pairing is Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966),151-74, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29.

17. See Bob Lingard, “The Changing State of Policy Production in Education: Some Australian Reflections on the State of Policy Sociology,” Internatiortal Studies in Sociology of Education 3, no. 1 (19931, 25-47.


have tried to dissolve the apparent contradictions in these other areas have often pointed to an either/or mentality as the main barrier. Once a dichotomy gets set up - between constraint and freedom, or structure and agency, or institutions and people, or writers and readers, or technology and society - perceptions are affected and there is a nearly overwhelming inclination to classify any event into either one or the other side of the dichotomy. Few, if any, phenomena are allowed to be both. Then, if it does become recognized that some process involves activity at both sites - say, that policy implementation involves both state efforts at imposition and guerrilla reformulation in the field- a post hoc adjustment is resorted to, involving perhaps alternation between the two sites. A policy sociologist might, for instance, argue for the importance of recognizing both that the actions of state officials limit the options of practitioners, and that in turn the responses of the practitioners affect officials’ future behavior.

In such an adjustment, the dichotomy remains intact; the two sites remain discrete, with the added nuance of a narrowly defined channel for communication across the gap. Analytical attention is then directed sequentially to both halves, as action on one side is followed by response on the other. But this, unfortunately, does little to dissolve the boundary between the two, which is where the problem actually lies. For thinking in terms of sequential action-response is not adequate to express how thoroughly each side is implicated in the very constitution of the other. Consider the reproduction/resistance pair: the way it works is not that an unalloyed act of reproduction elicits an act of pure resistance on someone else’s part. Most every action contains elements of both; most people behave in ways that foster both reproduction and resistance, and often at the very same time. Those who wish to upend the status quo exist in an environment permeated by status quo norms and ideologies, ways of thinking and being; it is not possible to step outside this setting to act against it. Everything they do is conditioned by this hegemonic context. And those who have an interest in maintaining the status quo are unable to escape the equally pervasive - if more modest - influence of oppositional formations.

The concepts of reproduction and resistance are unambiguous, but their actual occurrences are irretrievably mixed together. For our theoretical models to help us understand what we see happening around us, they really ought to express somehow the simultaneity of this pair, or any of the others listed above. Unfortunately, once the conceptual separations are established, once the boundaries are erected between technology and society, or structure and agency, it is unlikely that any resulting model could be welcoming of simultaneity. Ideally, what is needed is to dissolve those irksome boundaries, and deal with the mutuality of our painstakingly segre- gated categories. But is that really an alternative, can any sort of formal analysis proceed that way? As I remarked above, a thoroughly homogeneous model would offer little guidance as to how to proceed, whereas the more mechanistic model I have proposed does indicate specific points of interest, but leaves us the problem of how to integrate analysis of the several sites without setting them against one another. Perhaps it is the best we can do to proceed linearly, alternating sides, but continually reminding ourselves to view each site in light of its counterpart.

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The boundaries I would so like to dissolve do provide a service, do offer landmarks for the observer. This structure, supplied by what I consider ill-advised distinctions, is one I nonetheless find necessary to use in my study of the area it regulates. I need to inhabit it at the same time I disparage it, a rather uncomfortable stance, to say the least.

KINDRED SPIRITS

In the course of my preparation to write the first version of this essay [originally a dissertation chapter), I encountered a handful of published treatments of the technology and society problem which advocate approaches very similar to what I have proposed. These discoveries surprised me, since after having done a fair bit of reading in the area, and seeing the same weaknesses repeatedly (fruitless arguments between positions based on assumptions of technological determinism and technological neutrality, for example), I had come not to expect any fundamental challenges to the terms of the debate. But I found some, sharing important features with what I have written here. Two such works are books I have rarely seen cited by anyone, or included in any reading lists. I discovered both while browsing the library shelves: Majid Tehranian’s Technologies of Power: Information Machines and Democratic Prospects and David Lyon’s The Information Society: Issues and Illusions.‘x Their existence raises an interesting question: if these, and several better known, critiques of the state of discussion are available, why are their insights not being more widely adopted! Why have they not had any effect on the debate?

I will address that question after a brief synopsis of these two books. To begin with Tehranian, at the outset of his analysis of the global impact of information technology, he identifies four approaches to studying the impact of technologies in general, and information technology in particular. One he labels technophilia, represented by optimists who believe the new technologies have already begun to inaugurate an information age, “with higher productivity and plenty at the world centers that will eventually trickle down to the peripherie~.”‘~ This position matches what I have been calling benign technological determinism. Tehranian labels the second approach technophobia, a pessimistic view that anticipates new technologies will bring increased unemployment, maldistribution of wealth, enhanced surveillance, loss of privacy, and homogenization of culture; the equivalent is my malevo- lent determinism.20 His third approach is technoneutralism, typically promoted by “consultants, who have few theoretical pretensions and considerable interest at stake not to alienate their clients,” and corresponding to the neutrality position I criticize.

All three of these positions, he says, make the mistake of viewing technology as separate from society. Since ”technologies, from the moment of their inception in

18. Majid Tehranian, Technologies o f Power: Informution Machines and Democratic Prospects (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1990) andDavid Lyon, The Information Society: Issues and Illusions [Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1988).

19. Tehranian, Technologies of Power, 4. 20. Ibid., 5.


scientific laboratories to their time of entry into the consumer markets, are inextri- cably tied to the social structures of domination and dependency,” they are intrinsically “neither good, nor bad, nor neutral,” eliminating the first three alternativesz1 In their place, he urges - much as I do - a perspective that avoids drawing a technology/society distinction, and focuses on the social contexts where technologies are developed, and the ones where they areused. What he calls technostructuralism recognizes that technologies “developed out of institutional needs (in the case of information technologies, primarily military and business needs) and their impact is always mediated through the institutional arrangements and social forces of which they are an integral part.”22

He concludes by insisting: the origin, development, and uses of technologies must be problematized. Technologies lock into institutional arrangements and social forces; they link up with those perennial structures of power and hierarchies of class, ethnicity, race, and gender that have dominated much of the substance of politics in history. Information technologies play an auxiliary role in the maintenance of these structures and hierarchies and challenges to them. By themselves they can neither explain nor rectify the malaise of demo~racy.~”

These are exactly my concerns, and the guiding principles of my own efforts. The approach taken by David Lyon in his book - a comprehensive critique of

the notion that we are in the midst of a total social transformation driven by the new information technologies [“IT”), a transition to a fundamentally different “information society” - is even closer to my own. He begins by claiming the main problem with belief in an impending information society is the one-way relationship [technological determinism) assumed by the phrase “social impact of technology”:

For it suggests that technology is somehow ”outside” society, impingingupon it. An alternative view, which I illustrate throughout the book, is that the “social” and the ”technological” cannot be separated in this way. New technology is as much a social product as the shape of society is a technological product.24

The points at which he sees social factors enter the picture are the same two I highlight, the contexts of development and of use:

For one thing, IT has social origins (in military research for instance] which are seldom laid bare, but which have decisively guided its development. For another, new technology is not always accepted and assimilated passively. Consumers may decline to buy new gadgets (cable television is a case in point); workers may oppose the installation of new machines [think of newspaper printers).2s

He continues by cautioning that, once designed, the technology is not neutral, but has its own influence, beyond what the people using i t have in mind:

At the same time, I do not wish to replace technological with social determinism. IT has many unforeseen social consequences, and must be treated as a relatively independent factor within some specific circumstances. The technical convergence between computing and telecommunications does have ramifications which are quite unintended.2h

21. Ibid., xv-xvi. 22. Ibid., 5-6. 23. Ibid., 242. 24. Lyon, Information Society, viii. 25. Ibid. Heis writingnot in theunitedstates, where subscription to cableTVhas becomequite widespread, but in the United Kingdom, where the marketing effort has apparently been less successful. 26. Ibid.

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Lyoii opposes technological determinism and neutralism, for the same reasons I do: technological determinism obscures the way powerful social institutions influence the development and use of technology, while neutralism (or, as he says, social determinism) exaggerates technological pliability, ignoring the limits on how easily technology can be made to conform to a given agenda. He rejects both these perspectives so as to open a space for effective public involvement in deciding the future of technology: “To deny technological (or social) determinism is to abandon inevitability, and to clear a way for the consideration and promotion of alternative paths for IT devel~pment.”~’And, like me, he traces these two misapprehensions to the drawing of an ill-advised distinction between technology and society.

Given that these critiques of the state of discussion have been available for some time, why have they not had much effect?2x Why does the debate continue as before? Why has the idea not caught on, even among critically minded writers, that technology and society are best understood not as discrete entities, but as a complex unity?

I wish I had a good answer to that question; I ain actually at somewhat of a loss to explain the relatively small impact of this work. Could it be that i t simply is not very good work? I think not. All four books I mentioned are lucid and thoughtful. Lyon‘s, in particular, strikes me as exemplary: it is comprehensive, maintains a clear focus on its themes, and amply supports its claims. I would certainly consider using it in a graduate seminar. But apparently few others have.

It is possible that one or several of these books have suffered from American intellectual isolationism, or from an author being located at an outlying university, or from focusing on difficult epistemological questions, or from having an explicit political agenda. But I find none of these explanations compelling. My own guess is that the failure of any of these books to have much influence on the practice of technology analysis has more to do with Williams’s comment, regarding seeing simultaneously yet differently, that I have referred to repeatedly. All four advocate inodes of analysis that eschew facile application of a ready-made framework; all insist that understanding the role of technology requires a nuanced, flexible study, one that does several different things at once, and balances them in ways that cannot be specified in advance. Considering a problem from multiple perspectives - in partial conflict with each other - at the same time is not the sort of technique that is easily absorbcd and used. It is understandable that relatively few are tempted to adopt such an approach.

Furthermore, the view these authors have been promoting threatens entrenched interests, namely, those organizations and groups of people who benefit from current forms of technology and the institutional mechanisms through which technologies

27. Ibid., 25

28. As h a w a few more widely read works offering broadly similar critiques ~ see, for instance, Jennifcr Daryl Slack, Communicution Technologies and Society: Conceptions of Causality and the Politics of Techimlogical Intervention [Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1984), and Frank Webster and Kevin Robins, Informn- lion Technology: A Luddite Analysis (Norwood, N.J.: Ablcx, 1986).

BKOMLEY SOCIAL CHICKEN AND TECHNOLOGICAL EGG 65

are employed, as well as those academic gatekeepers who thrive on rigid disciplinary boundaries and stock methodologies. Their work is far less likely to garner support from these quarters than is writing more consonant with the status quo, introducing another impediment to its circulation.

AN AGENDA FOR SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING

Although work of the sort just described has received limited attention - especially in the field of educational technology -I am convinced it offers our best opportunity to understand adequately the tangle of social relations any technology participates in. As an example (to take a special concern of mine), how might we examine the presence of computing technology in schools, and its involvement in the maintenance and/or transformation of gender relations in that site.2y The model I have proposed would direct our attention to two matters in particular.

First, the context in which these artifacts are being used: how do power structures in school environments, and beyond, shape the way computing occurs? Recalling the stories about computers and schools I sketched at the outset, we need to ask, for instance, how the technology gets swept up into the operation of a youth culture offering rigidly distinct roles for girls and boys; who is likely to be left out of a digital encoding of “our” culture - particularly at a time of increasing commodification and market-based valuation of everything from information to students themselves; and what space exists for computer-using activists to battle those exclusions.

The second matter the model would raise is the context in which educational computing evolved: what norms have been built into the technology, through what processes, and how do they constrain later use? We need to ask how inevitable McClintock’s “irreversible” changes really are, and what their relationship is to the militaristic and male-dominated culture out of which computers emerged.

It is questions such as these that may expose to scrutiny the network of power relations, institutional structures, and cultural norms that undergirds technocratic practices, in schools as elsewhere.

29. For an effort to do just that, see Hank Bromley, ”Engendering Technology: The Social Practice of Educational Computing” 1Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995).

Documents

THE SOCIAL CHICKEN AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL EGG: EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING AN THE TECHNOLOGY/SOCIETY DIVIDE