Chapter 14
In James Curran’s provoking account of seven types of media history, the last – communication as technology – is also the least (Curran 2002a: 51–54). It is however what roused him into writing his rival narratives of media history. Media history is, he claims, the neglected grandparent of media studies. Today, it is isolated, ignored and rarely visited by its offspring. By way of proof, an American textbook is cited whose chapter on ‘Narratives of media history’ makes no reference even in passing to any conventional historical study of the media. It focuses instead on Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard. Both are returned to in the epilogue to the chapter, which deals with ‘technological determinist accounts of the media’s transformative influence’. It is not clear that these in fact are historical accounts – some of the authors cited are clearly historians (Innis and Eisenstein), some have made gestures in that direction (McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy is kind of historical), and some are not concerned with history at all (Meyrowitz, Castells and Baudrillard). In short, a disparate body of authors whom Curran has read are lumped together and called a ‘tradition’ but, if it is a tradition, it has not much to do with media histories (conventional or otherwise) and more to do with what Meyrowitz has called ‘medium theory’, a label that has achieved some degree of recognition in the last fifteen years or so (Meyrowitz 1994).
But let that pass, and also the absence in the narrative of any reference to much good and interesting historical work, in Europe and North America, on media and communication technologies.1 I am more interested in Curran’s bafflement as to ‘why this tradition [as so defined by him] should be invested with such authority’. His objection to it, which he takes to be fatal, is that it is overdeterministic. It treats technology as a monocausal, explanatory factor of historical change and ignores all those other factors (economic, political and cultural) in the play of history. This is not exactly a new argument. It was made rather more fully and thoughtfully over thirty years ago by Raymond Williams in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, a book that made an important contribution to thinking historically about technologies of communication (Williams 1974). As such, it surely merited at least a mention in James Curran’s ‘seventh narrative’. Williams, as we will see, took the question of technology seriously. Curran does not, and that is fatal, if it is the case, as I wish to argue, that the question concerning technology is (or should be) at the heart of any serious effort to think about the question of mediated communication or, in short, the media.
What follows then from raising the question of technology? It has two dimensions to it: the question of technology as such and the question of this or that technology. The first asks ‘what is technology in general?’, while the second asks ‘what are the implications of particular technologies?’ Both questions are crucial to understanding media, but I will focus on the first one in this chapter. It will readily be granted, I hope, that the question of technology has been a matter of abiding concern throughout the modern era, however defined. Technological innovation is one defining characteristic of modernity. What was the industrial revolution if not a revolution in the means of production, a transformation in the relationship between human beings and machines? Older technologies depended on human input and energy; they were hand powered. The new technologies that brought in the era of mass production had energy inputs from non-human sources (fire, steam, electrical and atomic power) that far surpassed the labour power of human hands and had the effect of inverting the relationship between human beings and their creations. Hitherto, human beings controlled the machines they made. From the nineteenth century onwards, it seemed to be the other way around. It was as if the awesome power of modern technologies produced human beings as their servo-mechanisms, mere cogs in their complex industrial machinery. In the popular imagination of the early twentieth century, human beings were themselves transmogrifying into machines in a machine civilization.
Modern power technologies right through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century were a constant source of anxiety in literature and the arts, in academia and the popular culture of the so-called advanced industrial societies of Europe and North America. It is not necessary here to sketch in the details. I will simply note, by way of illustration, how the question of technology was thought of in the early twentieth century by some of the intellectual ancestors of late twentieth-century cultural and media studies. It was a central concern of critical theory. Technical efficiency, scientific management in the workplace, was developed in America by the industrial psychologist, Frederick Taylor, in the early years of the twentieth century and applied to the automobile industry by Henry Ford. Taylorism and Fordism became bywords, in Western Marxism, for the ruthless exploitation of industrial labour. A critique of Taylorism was at the heart of Georg Lukacs’ famous essay, written in 1923, on ‘History and class-consciousness’. For Lukacs, the application of scientific methods to the achievement of technical efficiency in the workplace was the mark of the definitive reification of modern consciousness. It confirmed Max Weber’s melancholy conclusion that instrumental (means-oriented) rationality prevailed over substantive (ends-oriented) rationality in the iron cage of modernity. It was proof of the rationality of the parts and the irrationality of the whole. The world as a whole was no longer accessible to modern thought.2
Lukacs’ synthesis of Marx and Weber was absorbed into the bloodstream of the Frankfurt School’s thinking. The critique of the culture industries developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, exiles from Germany in America from the mid-1930s, was premised on the penetration of culture by industrial methods. The technological process itself was at the heart of their critique – mass production was an anonymous, machine-dominated process whose uniform, standardized products eliminated individuality and difference. The inhuman technologies of mass production dehumanized the workers, their products and their consumers. This, although elegantly put, was a commonplace argument. In England at exactly the same time, F. R. Leavis (the perhaps unlikely ‘grandfather’ of British cultural studies) was developing a critique of what he variously called machine or mass civilization along the same lines but without the theoretical sophistication (cf. Leavis and Thompson 1932). And both cases were part of a much wider general societal concern with technology as part of an overall logic of domination that threatened to overwhelm vulnerable, isolated individuals. If this now seems somewhat apocalyptic, it should not be forgotten that the apocalypse was indeed nigh. The destructive powers of modern technologies were unleashed on land, sea and air in a six-year global war at the end of which over 50 million people had perished and large parts of urban Europe had been reduced to rubble. The annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb, which ended the Japanese–American war immediately, was final awesome proof of the power of modern scientific technologies and ushered in a new era of global politics.
This brief historical sketch of the technological question in the era of high modernity, from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, although hopelessly condensed, is not, I hope, inaccurate. The dominant perception of technology, for more than a century, throughout the industrial world and in all sectors of society was fraught with anxiety and for good reasons. Technological innovation drove the economy on all fronts and, in the emerging industrial–military–political complexes of the conflict-ridden countries of the world, weapons of mass destruction were stockpiled and at last put to their mass destructive use in a war which was, for Horkheimer, the end of reason. It was the end of reason in a double sense: the final end or outcome of modern secular rationality and, at the same time, its termination. ‘The dictators were rational enough to build tanks. Others should be rational enough to submit to them’ (Horkheimer 1978 [1946]: 28).
Is technology then no more than a curse? How might it be a blessing? To put it this way is to raise its question as a dialectics, a morality, of power – a power for human good and ill. That is how it was raised, on the cusp of the midtwentieth century, in a hugely influential essay whose title has echoed through my text thus far: ‘The question concerning technology’, by Martin Heidegger (1949/1978). The philosophy of technology is a recent and fast-growing subdivision of intellectual labour in that field of academic enquiry, and Heidegger’s essay is a key text. In the view of the editors of the Philosophy of Technology, it ‘is probably the single most influential – though by no means the most popular – position in the field’ (Scharff and Dusek 2003: x. See pp. 265–338 for various responses to Heidegger). Here, I am less concerned with the substance of Heidegger’s essay and more with its historical significance, as a response to the experience of the world at that time. The substance of Heidegger’s essay does not strike me as particularly original beyond the important fact that he raised the question of technology as a proper concern of philosophy. His views on that question echo fairly commonplace attitudes at the time. When Heidegger thinks of technology, he thinks of then ultra-modern things in the late 1940s – jet aircraft, radar and (characteristically) the hydro-electric plant on the river Rhine (Heidegger 1978: 312). These very new things are then contrasted with very old hand-made things, craft products, a silver chalice for instance, whose making he discusses in some detail. Heidegger does not of course discuss the making of a jet plane for that he simply could not imagine.
For someone like Heidegger, writing in the late 1940s at the age of sixty, there were memories from childhood of an older pre-industrial way of life – of rural, village life, rooted in the landscape and quietly adjusted to the order of nature and natural time. That was Heidegger’s heritage in the small town of Messkirch in Southern Germany where he was born and grew up. There is much irony in the rediscovery (reinvention) of Heidegger as the precursor of postmodern thought, for he was in just about every conceivable way a premodern thinker. An illuminating recent monograph by Adam Sharr on Heidegger’s Hut confirms this point. The hut was built in 1922 as a retreat for thinking – a retreat from the urban life of a university professor in the town below to a little three-roomed cabin built into the hillside of a sloping meadow with no other buildings around it. It had no electricity or running water (which was fetched by bucket from a nearby well) and looked out across a valley to the mountains in the distance. For the next fifty years and more, Heidegger escaped to die Hütte whenever he could. It was where he thought and wrote. Its simplicity gave him tranquillity for thinking and kept the busy modern world below at bay. Heidegger resisted modern technologies in the hut for many years but finally acknowledged the usefulness of electric lighting and a telephone which were installed some time in the 1950s (Sharr 2006: 104). It was from his hut that Heidegger contemplated the question of modern technology.
Heidegger came from a generation for whom there was still a lingering real memory of a pre-technological world. That nostalgia shows up equally in the thinking of his exact English counterpart who resembles him in many ways, F. R. Leavis, who taught English Literature at Cambridge University. Leavis, like Heidegger, looked back to a pre-industrial, rural era and grieved for its passing. Like so many intellectuals in the early to mid-twentieth century, they both experienced and thought of technology as a malignant, alien power. Their prevalent response was one of repulsion at The Wasteland of modern urban life and aesthetic disgust with the ugliness of modern technologies – the blight, say, cast on the traditional landscape by the march of electricity pylons across the fields in the 1930s. There was moral indignation at the plight of the masses, victims in both the workplace and their homes, of the forces of mass production. There was existential anxiety about the alienated conditions of modern metropolitan life and fear of the destructive potential of hightechnology weapons of mass destruction made horribly plain for all to see in the aerial bombing of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War. The dialectics of technological power are plain enough in all of this, and the fears and anxieties of those times cannot be dismissed as the products of fevered intellectual imaginations. They were real and widespread and justified.
But we also see the emergence in the early twentieth century of something else that Raymond Williams saw so passionately: the industrial revolution, driven by technology, was a long revolution for the good – ‘not just mechanical, external progress, but a real service of life’.
For one thing I knew this: at home we were glad of the Industrial Revolution, and of its consequent social and political change. True, we lived in a beautiful farming valley, and the valleys beyond the limestone we could see were all ugly. But there was one gift that was overriding, one gift which at any price we would take, the gift of power that is everything to men who have worked with their hands. It was slow in coming to us, in all its effects, but steam power, the petrol engine, electricity, these and their host of products in commodities and services we took as quickly as we could get them and were glad. I have seen all these things being used, and I have seen the things they replaced. I will not listen to any acid listing of them – you know the sneer you can get into plumbing, baby Austins,3 aspirin, contraceptives, canned food. But I say to these Pharisees: dirty water, an earth bucket, a four mile walk each way to work, headaches, broken women, hunger and monotony of diet. The working people, in town and country alike, will not listen (and I support them) to any account of our society which supposes that these things are not progress: not just mechanical, external progress, but a real service of life. Moreover, in these new conditions, there is more real freedom to dispose of our lives, more real personal grasp where it matters, more real say. Any account of our culture which implicitly or explicitly denies the value of an industrial society is really irrelevant; not in a million years would you make us give up this power.
Williams (1989 [1958a]: 10)
The industrial revolution offered ‘the masses’ a priceless gift, ‘the gift of power that is everything to men who have worked with their hands’ and they will not, in a million years, give it up. The power of technology – ‘steam power, the petrol engine, electricity, these and their host of products in commodities’ – is the gift of freedom. Negatively, it is a liberation from toil, suffering and hardship; positively, it is the freedom of control over one’s life and circumstance – ‘more real personal grasp where it matters, more real say’. And who are the Pharisees who would deny this with their easy sneers?
Williams is almost certainly thinking of George Orwell and this passage from The Road to Wigan Pier:
Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate, the movies, the radio, strong tea and the foot-ball pools have between them averted revolution.
Orwell (1965 [1937]: 90–91)4
We should note the easy presumption (so characteristic of bourgeois intellectuals then) of knowing what the masses ‘really need’ and what they really don’t. What they really needed, in Orwell’s considered opinion, was a revolution (such as he had just fought in) and not an array of cheap luxuries that mitigated the surface of life but failed, presumably, to plumb its depths. In Williams’ carefully thought out list of things, each is a remedy to an ill: indoor plumbing [running water, a bathroom and water closet (WC)] replaces dirty water and an outdoor earth closet, a small car alleviates a four-mile walk each way to work, aspirin relieves headache, contraceptives prevent women from being broken, in body and spirit, by endless unwanted pregnancies, canned food mitigates hunger and monotony of diet. Williams knows what (and who) he is talking about. Does Orwell? Yet his was the prevalent view of the masses at the time among the European progressive intelligentsia, for whom the revolutionary potential of the urban proletariat had been undone by the soft deceptions of mass culture. That was the whole point of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the new culture industries and Marcuse’ influential concept of ‘affirmative culture’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1986 [1944]; Marcuse 1968 [1937]): the masses were ‘bought off’ and made safe for capitalism by the ground-bait of cheap luxuries.
Williams’ postwar thinking is radically different from that of prewar intellectuals, and a key reason for this is that the postwar world of the 1950s to which he was responding had changed profoundly from the prewar world in Europe and North America with which Adorno, Horkheimer, Orwell, Heidegger, Leavis and their generation had engaged. I have suggested elsewhere that the global war of the 1940s was the historical hinge of the last century (Scannell 2007: 260–93). The world going into it and the world coming out of it was different. And this was due, I argued, to a long-term shift in the world economy, in train well before the war but only decisively established in its aftermath, as it moved from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance. The life circumstances of individuals were changing from prewar work-defined patterns of existence to new postwar leisuredefined ways of living. The coercive time of work and the workplace no longer dominated individual life and experience which were now oriented towards free time. The pendulum was swinging from production to consumption. It was a decisive change of gear in the long, still continuing world historical process of societal modernization in which subsistence economies and the forms of life developed in adjustment to them gave way to unprecedented surplus economies of abundance and new forms of life defined, for the time, by economic choice and freedom.
This structural transformation of the world economy, taking place in the mid-twentieth century, marked the passing of the time of the masses and the emergence of the time of everyday life. The time of the masses was defined by the politics of poverty which erupted into historical life in the French Revolution when the Parisian masses rose in the name of bread and freedom. Poverty at that moment ceased to be a natural fact and became social fact and a central, unavoidable political issue. The question of the masses, from the late eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War, was the defining economic and political issue in North America and Europe: mass production, mass politics, mass society, mass culture and, in the end, mass slaughter through weapons of mass destruction. This was the era of modernity, the era in which the secular politics of European enlightenment were worked through in continuous response to the new mode of production, factory capitalism and its mass-produced commodities, themselves the products of the appliance of science and new power technologies.
Technologies are not superimposed on history from above by the invisible hand of God or the market, but are rather the material means through which history is made, key instruments of historical change in a double sense – the expression of changes taking place in the world and the means whereby that change is sought for and realized.5 Williams (1974) emphasized that technologies are always meant and intended as solutions to current economic, political and social concerns – the kinds of technologies a society produces and puts to use tell you something essential about that society, not merely its level of material ‘development’, but also the character of its social relations, where it puts its energies, its concerns and commitments. The essence of technology is nothing technological, as Heidegger pointed out. Technologies, the products of human thought, imagination and knowledge, are world disclosing: in their conceptualization, application and use, they reveal something central about the historical human world that has produced them as the material means to human ends.
As a small historical thought experiment to explore this a little further, the core theme of this chapter, we might try to identify what we think of as the world-defining technologies of today and compare them with those of sixty years ago. Why that particular moment in the past? Because I take it that our world, the world on the cusp of the twenty-first century, is in almost every way the product of the world that emerged from the end of the Second World War. The war was an end and a beginning. The emergent world of the late 1940s has begun to surpass the era of high modernity whose boundaries were defined by revolution at the start and war in the end. 1945 marks the passage from modernity to postmodernity. We can ‘read’ the essential character of this transformation through structural differences in the world-defining technologies of sixty years ago and now. What were they then, what are they now? I have already mentioned what I take as the world-defining technology of the late 1940s – the atomic bomb. As for today, I think the internet and (or) the cell phone would be pretty safe bets, but either will do for they are closely connected.
No technology has a stand-alone existence. The atomic bomb stands alongside all the other technologies of mass destruction – the planes, tanks, battleships, guns and munitions – that had long been invented, manufactured and stockpiled for killing purposes in Europe and North America. And likewise many technologies of communication converge in the application and use of the internet and the cell phone. The atomic bomb still exists today, just as the telephone existed sixty years ago. But the bomb was then a worlddominating technology (and the telephone was not), whereas today their positions have reversed with the telephone in the foreground of daily life everywhere and the bomb as a background threat in global politics, no longer the defining issue in world politics today as it was in the cold war era. The bomb and the cell phone, then: one a technology of mass destruction, the other a technology of interpersonal communication. I take this difference, which I will explore in a little detail, as pointing to the essence of the transformation from the world of modernity to our postmodern world.
The classic ‘moment’ in which this change first clearly showed up was the 1950s – the pivotal decade of the last sixty years in which the decisive transition to an economy of abundance made its impact felt in all aspects of contemporary life. The decade of the 1950s is the historical key to an understanding of the world we inhabit today. In those years, for the first time, the majority of people in North America and Northern Europe began to enjoy a life of modest affluence: in Britain, the Tories won an election in 1959 with the slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ and, in the United States, its most distinguished economist, J. K. Galbraith, wrote a bestselling book called The Affluent Society. The majority of people – and this was Williams’ core perception in the passage quoted above, published in 1958 – now had a marginal surplus of disposable time and money. The hungry thirties, as they were known in both countries, became a vanishing memory as most people, no longer governed by necessity, began to enjoy a measure of freedom and control in the disposition of their lives.
And this change depended, as Williams saw so clearly, on the technological transformation of everyday life then taking place. When Heidegger thought about the question of technology he thought of radar, jet planes and a hydro-electric plant and contrasted them with pre-industrial craft instruments and technologies. Such thinking was typical of an older generation at that time. What he failed to attend to was the emergence, at that moment, of quite new technologies that we are all now familiar with as white goods or domestic appliances. The wired home of today, with its host of electrical appliances, was decisively established through all sectors of societies only fifty or so years ago. Electric clothes and dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, fridges and freezers took the toil out of domestic labour and saved time. In the thirties, the family wash would take a working class woman four days: on Mondays, clothes were washed and wrung dry by hand. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they hung out to dry. On Thursdays, they were ironed. Before fridges and freezers, shopping was a daily necessity and involved trips on foot to different shops for different things: to fetch and carry from the grocer, the baker, the butcher, the greengrocer, the fishmonger. Today, the family shop is done by car once a week in one large convenience store or supermarket.
The new domestic appliances that came into general use in the 1950s were labour- and time-saving innovations that freed people from hitherto unavoidable and necessary domestic toil and from time-consuming daily tasks. That was the negative freedom they offered. And what did people do with their new-found free time? They continued to enjoy the services of the prewar culture industries (radio, cinema and the record industry), widely condemned by the prewar intelligentsia. They began, in millions, to watch television. And they talked to each other. ‘Talk’ was, in various ways, one of the great academic discoveries across a range of disciplines in North America and Europe in the 1950s (Scannell 2007: 171–97). The disappearance of ‘the masses’ in the 1950s was accompanied by the discovery of people – ordinary people talking to each other in the mundane situations and circumstances of daily life. If it is true that sex began in the 1960s, then conversation began in the 1950s – or at the very least it came to the notice of academics in that decade as part of their discovery of ‘everyday life’.
This is not to say that talk and everyday life did not exist before the second half of the last century, but it is to draw attention to the fact that hitherto they were beneath history and below the radar of sociology for instance. In the 1950s, the mundane world of daily life and its universal medium of communication, talk, were both historicized by the then very new medium of television: not just by television, of course, but by television as a significant index of world transformation taking place in the 1950s and certainly by television as the emerging new medium of everyday life itself, in which the mundane and the ordinary now began to achieve a universal visibility that it had never before possessed. Television was the key electrical, domestic appliance that contributed to the historicization of the hitherto unhistorical mundane world of ordinary, everyday existence.
It did not appear in the 1950s by happenstance. The general conditions of its possibility did not exist before then; that is, the possibility of its wholesale uptake and use across all sectors of society. More than its precursor, radio, television is pre-eminently a technology whose purchase and use presupposes societies in which the majority of people have marginal surpluses of disposable money and time for its enjoyment. Television was, from the start and has remained to this day, an everyday social medium enjoyed by its viewers in their free time as a leisure activity, primarily as a source of entertainment and (to a lesser extent) as a source of information, a ‘window on the world’. The technology of the TV set, the apparatus that must be acquired in order to access the viewing world, is one of those domestic apparatuses discussed above that contributed to the unobtrusive transformation of daily life in the postwar world. The condition of television’s possibility presupposes a world oriented to domesticity; a way of life centred on households, the sphere of privacy, home and family, whose members were free from domestic necessity, from such time-consuming and onerous chores as daily fire-lighting (cleaning the ashes from the grate, chopping wood, fetching coal, laying the new fire – as I did, in my childhood), shopping for food, cooking, washing and so forth…. The new domestic technologies of the 1950s gave the conditions of domestic leisure which television fulfilled so spectacularly: freedom from toil and necessity, freedom for relaxation and leisure.6 Ever since then, in European and North American households, watching television has remained the preferred daily leisure activity of whole populations across all classes, for women and men, young and old.
What are we to make of this – what does television-as-an-appliance (as a domestic technology, a household good, a consumer durable) tell us about the kind of society that created it and the kind of world that it complements and enhances? Let me tie this question in with the little thought experiment I proposed above. I’ll put it summarily. The atomic bomb is a formal indication of a world defined by struggle, conflict and war. The internet and cell phones are formal indications of a world defined by communicative sociability. In short, the fundamental underlying transformation of the world, driven by continuing technological innovation in the last sixty years, was perfectly and presciently anticipated by the late Winston Churchill as a change from ‘war war to jaw jaw’: from global conflict (Second World War) to global conversation (the cell phone) and, hence, the crucial significance of the role of television in the historicization of talk and the mundane world (and their academic discovery at the same time) in the 1950s. The technological turn in the postwar world was away from technologies of mass destruction (no new weapon has been developed in the last sixty years that in fact surpasses the destructive power of the now old technologies of the atomic and hydrogen bombs) and towards technologies of communication; a field that has seen massive, continuing innovation in every decade with new technologies sometimes displacing and sometimes combining with older ones. The increasing interconnection of communication technologies old and new, their convergence in the internet, is a formal indication of the single, globally interconnected world that we inhabit now at the start of the twenty-first century. At the start of the 1950s, the natural horizon of experience for most people was defined by where they lived and worked. In the course of the fifties and sixties, their horizons were extended by nationwide broadcast services. And in the last thirty years or so, continuing technical innovation in all aspects of telecommunications has produced the whole world as the common and natural horizon of all individual experience, a development anticipated by Marshall McLuhan well before it actually happened.
I began by emphasizing the prevailing attitude to technology throughout the classic era of industrial modernization as one of high anxiety – and not without good reason for coal- and steam-powered technologies were large, dirty, dangerous and unhealthy, often positively life-threatening, not just for coal-miners, say, but for the whole of society. But more than that, what drove science and technology in the conflict-ridden Europe of the first half of the last century was the pursuit of bigger and better weapons of mass destruction. The technological sublime of modernity, one might say, was oriented to destruction and death and realized in its ultimate achievement, the ‘ultimate weapon’ of the atom bomb. This is not to argue for the atom bomb as the cause of anything: it is simply to take it as a formal indication of a world whose defining realities were, in the end, conflict, war and mass destruction. The technologies that a society produces are real and true indications of its fundamental concerns and commitments. The atomic bomb is a significant index (and indictment) of the whole international economic, military and political power structure of that era. It serves as a metonym for the logic of domination so clearly articulated in the critical tradition that ran from Marx, Weber and Lukacs through to Adorno, Horkheimer and other members of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt.
Now of course, in the era of high modernity (the interwar period), another technological formation was ‘working through’ those years as the world economy began to turn towards the mass production of domestic goods and of entertainment for the masses. The full working through of that development took off in the defining postwar decade of the 1950s when conditions of modest affluence were finally secured through all sectors of society in the countries of North America and Northern Europe. The key new technologies of the second half of the last century, through to the present, are all to do with communication: television, the internet and the cell phone – surely the three now interconnected, world-defining, world-disclosing technologies of today.
How utterly different they are from the world-defining technology of sixty years ago. The cell phone is as small as the atom bomb was huge. The new technologies are clean and safe. They are durable and reliable. They are nonmalevolent, manifestly non-hostile to human life and human interests. They are people oriented, not people threatening. They are user friendly. They have what I have called a ‘for-anyone-as-someone’ structure (Scannell 2001): they are designed in such ways that anyone can use them for their own and particular purposes. PCs (personal computers) and cell phones are personal and interpersonal technologies of communication. The communicative turn is a crucial, defining feature of the postwar world. Talk is an intrinsically sociable and co-operative interaction that requires of all participants that they speak and listen to each other. To refuse to talk to someone is an intrinsically hostile act, a termination of friendship and a declaration of war (as when children say ‘I’m not talking to you any more!’). The increasingly communicative character of the postwar world is disclosive of two things: it is not merely the antithesis of the dominant anti-communicative ethos of the prewar world, it is its solution and resolution.7 War is the negation of communication and communication is the negation of war – as shown recently in the decision of the parties in Northern Ireland at last to stop killing each other and start talking to each other instead. Technologies in themselves neither create nor resolve conflict but, in either case, they are expressive of a prevailing ethos, a disposition one way or the other. As such, they are the material realization of general societal concerns, intentions and purposes, the means whereby they are valorized for good or ill. The take-off into the material world of modernity was brought about by the harnessing and exploitation of the power of natural energy sources. The question of power is at the heart of the question of technology and it is a moral question – the application of power for worldly purposes of good or ill. Life-threatening technologies of mass destruction on the one hand, for instance; life-enhancing technologies of communication on the other.
1 To take just a notable sample: Douglas (USA) 1987; Marvin (USA) 1990; Blondheim (Israel) 1994; Flichy (France) 1995; Kittler (Germany) 1999.
2 The Principles of Scientific Management was published by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. For a review of Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of Taylorism and the industrialisation of culture, see Scannell (2007: 31–51).
3 One of the first British mass manufactured small and affordable family cars.
4 For a mordant critique of this facile rhetorical style in Orwell’s writings, see Williams (1962 [1958b]: 278–79).
5 For a classic, nuanced defence of the claim that machines do make history, see Heilbroner (1967/2003).
6 The classic study of television, domestic life and leisure in the USA in the 1950s is Spigel (1992). In the UK, David Morley’s work on television as a domestic technology that exists in situ with other domestic electrical appliances is exemplary (Morley 2007).
7 I have in mind the key distinction, made by David Riesman, between the ‘modern’ inner and ‘postmodern’ other-directed individual. The former strong, silent, uncommunicative and unsociable type is taken to be the ideal–typical (Weberian) character in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The latter – oriented to others, sociable and chatty – is, in Riesman’s view, a very new phenomenon that is becoming visible in the immediate postwar era (Riesman 1950/1976). The gendered character of these two types is striking: the inner-directed individual is ‘masculine’ while the other-directed individual is ‘feminine’.