CM1007-Communication Technologies and their Impact
Book + Lecture Summary
Week 1
Fisher & Wright (2006)
On Utopias and Dystopias: toward an Understanding of the Discourse
Surrounding the Internet
This paper contextualizes some of the main issues of discussion regarding the Internet,
describing these positions in terms of utopian and dystopian perspectives; by using the theory
of the cultural lag, a framework is presented for understanding the extreme responses to the
technology;
Cultural Lag - the cultural lag theory suggests that the effects of a technology will not be
apparent to social actors for some time after it is introduced to a society;
➢ The most potent criticism of the theory is that it is technologically deterministic – it
sees technology as an autonomous independent variable affecting the dependent
variable of culture; the theory also suffers from a teleological bias → the notion that
the identification of a problem is carried out by a single, unified culture
➢ This theory explains the time lag between a technology’s invention, its distribution in
society, and the social adjustment that follows, arguing that technology moves
forward and the social institution lags behind in varying degrees → technology as
responsible for most social change
Four stages for a cultural lag: technological, industrial (business), governmental
(regulation), social philosophical (scholarly understanding)
➢ After the industrial sector responds to the new technology, government structures
adjust; one of the main ways that the state deals with new technology is by regulating
it; without regulation, the fourth stage of the cultural lag cannot adjust; it is within this
fourth stage that scholarship understands technology
Internet as one of the newer and more diffused technologies is having effects on societies
around the world → not only does technologically driven social change extent beyond the
Western world, but it has also become the product of social change as well as the driving
force behind it → not only drives society to change its behaviours, but it respond to it too
Utopian and Dystopian Visions of the Internet – one of the effects of a cultural lag are
extreme and unrealistic interpretations of the technology within the discourse surrounding it;
this antinomy pits the political utility of emerging information technology with the potential
for that same technology to further fragment society and increase anomie among its members
➢ We describe this dichotomy in terms of utopian and dystopian positions:
• A salient aspect of the utopian position is the notion that the communication
medium is fundamental in determining effects, and that there are technological
solutions to social problems; those are often described in terms of
technology’s effects on communitarian and populist forms of democratic
, participation → cyberspace helps democracy as it makes it easy for people to
communicate politically
- The communitarian argument suggests that the Internet will facilitate civic
engagement by increasing the ease of communication among citizens by
transcending geographic and social boundaries
- The populist model, in contrast, emphasizes technology’s role in
altering/facilitating the interaction between citizens and government
• The dystopian position has its roots in understanding the phenomenon of the
experience→emphasis on the potential of the medium to affect communication
in such a way that may negatively alter the practices and spaces of
communication that had previously nurtured democracy
• The argument is that democracy crumbles as the social fabric of society
becomes fragmented and people become more isolated from one another
➢ A third theme is noted beyond the latter dominant themes of utopian and dystopian
vision of the Internet → technorealism →in between standpoint; usually a position
taken by journalists and professionals; takes a more modest approach presenting a
more temperate view of the Internet’s effects on society; the notion is that the medium
is too new for scholars to determine effects → whatever questions we ask are likely
wrong questions
, Langdon Winner (1997)
Technology Today: Utopia or Dystopia?
Digital Technology as Cultural Solvent – what a conventional view of technology lacks is
any notion of technological development understood as a complex social, cultural, and
political phenomenon; the solely economic perspective on technological change fails to
illuminate forces and circumstances of crucial concern to many people; on most lists, the key
elements of this transformation include the following:
➢ The basis of wealth no longer depends on access to material resources, but from
application of brainpower to the creation of marketable goods and services
➢ Productive operations now presuppose “global” extension
➢ Patterns of factory organization and corporate bureaucracy are being replaced by new
means to achieve flexibility and adaptation to the customers’ needs
➢ Workers must be flexible and customer-oriented adapting to new ways of working
➢ Continuing digital transformation of a wide range of material artefacts and social
practices
As a general pattern, the technological world of today is one that everyone is made to feel
expendable; along the way many practices associated with loyalty or a sense of belonging in
coherent communities no longer count for much
Technological Drivenness and Social Construction – by reflecting and act intelligently upon
patterns in technology as they affect everyday life, it might be possible to guide techno-
cultural forms along paths that are humanly agreeable, socially just, and democratically
chosen → many scholars/activists/intellectuals are concerned to find approaches and
strategies that might place technological choices at centre stage
➢ For within today’s scholarly communities, notions of technological inevitability,
determinism, and imperative have gone out of fashion;
➢ The development and use of technology follow a fairly unilinear path that
technological change was a kind of univocal, determining force with a momentum
and highly predictable outcomes; there were optimistic and pessimistic versions:
• Optimistic: Modernization theory: the belief that all societies move through
stages of growth, or stages of development linked to technological
sophistication and social integration such that eventually they would reach
what was called the “take-off point” and achieve the kind of material
prosperity and way of life found in late-twentieth-century Europe and America
• Pessimistic: theories that focused upon the human and environmental costs of
rapid technological development
➢ During the past 25 years there has been a huge effort to show that the idea that
modern technology is a unilinear, univocal force is completely erroneous
Utopian Dreams – new technology will bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom,
revitalized (democratic) politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfilment; the world is
technologically driven, but its trajectory leads to favourable destinations – i.e. the hope that
, the spread of new information and communication technologies will serve to undermine
authoritarian regimes
➢ What results from utopian dreams of a technology codified as a political ideology
have resulted in what might be called cyberlibertarianism, linking ecstatic
enthusiasm for electronically mediated ways of living with radical, right-wing ideas
about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and democracy
• i.e. Offers a vision that many middle- and upper-class professionals find
coherent and appealing, seemingly attractive to white, male professionals with
disposable income to afford a computer at home in addition to the one they use
at work
- Radical individualism: ecstatic self-fulfilment in cyberspace; digital devices
offer endless opportunities and overcome inherited structures of social, political,
and economic organization which pose barriers to the exercise of personal power
and self-realization
Dystopian Shadows – within the sketches of a world transformed by digital technology and
global webs of production are some distinctly dystopian possibilities – i.e. black mirror
➢ The larger issue concerns problems for democratic society created when a handful of
organizations control all the major channels for news, entertainment, opinion, artistic
expression, and the shaping of public taste; those issues are left aside in the
cyberlibertarian thought
➢ Other points come in the projections about the communities that will form in
cyberspace – electronic neighbourhoods bound together not by geography but by
shared interests → those spaces can create barriers as most virtual locations will exist
as distinct spaces of private property → diversity achieved through segregation
Direct Engagement with Technical Things – the core element of high performance is to give
the front-line workers the responsibility, autonomy, and discretion for key decisions at all
points of production and to provide employees with the information, skills, and incentives
needed to successfully exercise those judgements → the decision to engage the shape of
production technologies directly is an important turn in labour’s understanding of its horizons
➢ A renewed awareness and willingness to act will not be enough; occasions for
participation in technology-shaping must be discovered, created, or forcefully
demanded
• High performance systems: exploring ways to influence the hardware, software,
and social arrangements of new workplace technologies
