Page 48 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: FpQ/IPH/GYQ
August 14, 2002
0 521 80067 6
CY101-Bimber
CY101-01
Plan of the Book 17:40
technology drives economics and political arrangements, not the other
way around. 39
I neither advocate nor attempt to refute technological determinism
here. In the first place, I do not try to explain where information tech-
nology comes from and what the determinants of its evolution are. I am
agnostic about whether information technology represents a human des-
tiny of some kind and also about the extent to which human agency can
shape its development. It is sufficient for my argument simply to take the
technology roughly as I find it. My strongest claim in this regard is about
the evolution of politics in the direction of information abundance, but I
do not propose a technologically deterministic accounting of why that is.
The claims of social constructionism are richer but less bold. Their
roots lie in the series of classic studies published in the mid-1960s by
Jacques Ellul, Leo Marx, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, and others. 40
These helped establish an intellectual tradition tracing the influence of
culture,economicinterests,andpoliticsontechnologicaldesign,andthey
positioned technology as a battleground over values and power. Jacques
Ellul’s The Technological Society contended that technological determin-
ists were subtly wrong. Advancing technology was indeed influencing the
human condition in profound ways, but not because of properties inher-
ent in technology. A collapse of deliberation regarding the public good
had led to failure of democratic control over technology. In the place of
public consideration and choice over technology was a set of normative
standards centered on efficiency and productivity. New technology, Ellul
and others argued, was now being accepted and adopted by publics wher-
ever it promised gains in economic efficiency, as if that one goal was itself
constitutive of a good society. The result was a technological enterprise
virtually autonomous of meaningful political control.
Contemporaryscholarsineconomics,history,politicalscience,sociol-
ogy, and the humanities have elaborated the work of Ellul and others into

39
The classic statement of this theory is found in Robert Heilbroner, “Do Machines
Make History?” Technology and Culture 8, no. 3 (1967): 333–345. For a discussion and
overview of the literature, see Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology
Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1994).
40
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964); Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2:The Pentagon
of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970); Herbert Marcuse, One
Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964).

31