Computers In The Information Society

Nathan Weinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367003265
• eBook ISBN: 9780429710308
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This book examines the unfolding cultural and organizational impact of computers on human society. Through this analysis, it discusses the role of information technology in people's lives, interdependence between the society and its computer creations, and expectations in the information society.

1
Technology, Computers, and Society

The rapid development of computer and microchip technology in the last forty years and particularly in the last decade has been revolutionary in ways we are only beginning to understand. The miniaturization of electronic circuitry has made possible computers with ever more power and memory at lower cost. With X-ray lithography and new microchip design architectures, miniaturization will continue to advance to at least the end of the century. Yet, even as we approach the limit of existing lithographic techniques used to draw the chip circuitry, experimental techniques, including optical and biological circuits, are being developed to allow higher circuit densities. We can reasonably expect computers to increase in processing power and memory in the foreseeable future.

Even without further miniaturization, the latest personal computers and workstations are more powerful than existing software applications can readily use. As processing power and memory increase, software and hardware will be tailored to more specific purposes. In a brief time, we have become accustomed to the presence of computers in our homes, schools, and offices. In one respect, this development represents the latest stage of the industrial revolution. In another regard, computers are part of an electronic revolution leading toward a new society—an information society dependent on computer processing and mass data storage. From both perspectives, computers and microprocessors have become the technology defining and delimiting many of the changes in our world.

The Industrial Society

The modern world that surrounds us is the outcome of four centuries of social and technological change. The industrial revolution began in societies that were predominantly rural and agrarian. Systems of manufacturing arose from innovations in commerce and production and gradually changed the agrarian world into the mechanized urban environment that we inhabit. The pace of commerce grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with major European ports handling imported raw materials from Asia and America and shipping out European commodities. This world system of raw-material import and finished-good export marked the demise of small-scale craft manufacture and local trade. In the nineteenth century, scientific discoveries and inventions led to dramatic improvements in technology and the scale of production.

The transition from the traditional agrarian society to the industrial society was not smooth. Political and social strife was commonplace, and many groups opposed the disruption of the agrarian and craft world. Only in the twentieth century have we come generally to accept social and economic change. Cultural values and beliefs that welcome new technologies have achieved widespread approval. Among these are

1. belief in the effectiveness of technology and science to resolve problems and bring about progress,
2. enthusiastic reception of new inventions in the home and work-place,
3. willingness to try new modes of working and organization in industry and in society generally, and
4. acceptance of new ways of thinking, learning, and communicating.

In the industrial society, the values of the new, the modern, and the efficient have gradually replaced older values. At times, the advent of a post-industrial society in which leisure and sports would take on a new importance has seemed imminent.

The fully developed industrial society of this century rests upon a complex technological infrastructure of information, procedure, and organization. This infrastructure is characterized by

1. large-scale organization for supply, production, and exchange of commodities,
2. application of technical/scientific rationality to all problems and processes,
3. institutional administrative centralization and record keeping, and
4. increasing specialization and interdependence in all spheres of activity (education, labor, manufacture, and service).

The advanced industrial system rests upon a global pattern of communication, finance, manufacture, and trade that links the most technologically developed societies with less developed societies. Few societies have been able to resist the attractions of technological advance.

The development and wide adoption of computers and microprocessors marks a new technological plateau and has led to a new set of expectations for the near future of industrial society.

1. Industrial work will be largely automated through the use of robots.
2. New industries and services based on computers and communication will flourish.
3. A new decentralized pattern of work at home on computers will emerge.
4. New forms of organization based on computers and communication will develop.

These expectations are not far removed from the vision of the post-industrial society. At the same time, computers accelerate the existing tendencies in the technological structure toward centralization and control, interdependence, specialization, and application of scientific/technical rationality.

In the recent past, industrial society has received wireless radio, airplanes, television, nuclear power, satellites, and many other inventions with great expectations of marvelous change. Although we may greet new inventions with enthusiasm, the widespread adoption of a new technology is a complex cultural and organizational task. In the long term, we can see considerable change in the technological structure of society from the accumulated impact of many inventions and scientific breakthroughs. Social and cultural changes are more difficult to assess. In the case of any particular new invention or breakthrough, the expectation of revolutionary change may prove to be exaggerated. We have only recently learned to study and assess the impact of new technologies as we deploy them. The damage from environmental pollution and technological disasters have forced us to evaluate the balance of positive and negative effects from technological change.

The Telephone and Society—A Case Study

Interesting parallels exist between the development of the telephone system over the last century and what is taking place today with computers. We can gain some perspective on our expectations for computers by considering the expectations for telephones and the actual system that emerged. The introduction of workable telephones after the Bell inventions of the 1870s produced a large volume of predictions and speculations about the uses and social consequences of telephones. These predictions have been analyzed by Ithiel de Sola Pool in Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment. He divided the forecasts into twelve groups including predictions for telephone system development and services; impacts on the city, environment, economy, and polity; impacts on social organization and customs; and impacts on conceptions of self and culture. Within each group, forecasts were categorized as

• Type A—the telephone will be used in manner x
• Type B—the telephone will be used in manner x, so society will be changed in manner y
• Type C—with wide use of phones, society will be changed in manner y
• Type D—other propositions¹

The same categories could easily be applied to a study of forecasts about the computer.

We cannot review all the predictions about the impact of the telephone, but some relate directly to current predictions for computers. For example, consider the following forecasts:

1. Telephones will become pervasive and universal.
2. The telephone system will require directories and phonograph records will be used as a storage medium.
3. Telephones will foster the separation of plant and office and favor the growth of skyscrapers, suburbs, and urban sprawl.
4. Telephones will end rural isolation; the rural operator provides many community services.
5. Telephones will democratize hierarchic relations and foster management from a distance.
6. Telephones will open new job opportunities but messenger jobs will decline.
7. Telephones will be used for shopping.
8. Telephones will increase productivity.
9. Telephones will foster government growth but reduce bureaucratic rigidity and the keeping of written records.
10. Telephones will be useful for reaching voters and will democratize society.
11. International telephony will foster world peace.
12. Telephones will be useful for command and control in warfare.
13. Telephones will improve law enforcement but telephone crime will be a problem.
14. Use of the telephone will reduce the need to travel and provide a bond for communities.
15. Codes of telephone courtesy will develop.
16. Telephones will both increase and decrease privacy and foster both sociability and impersonality.
17. Telephones will facilitate dissemination of knowledge.
18. Telephones will change people’s sense of distance.

These forecasts, both positive and negative, reflect the varied effects of the telephone on different parts of communities and institutions. Some impacts are contradictory. The telephone does increase and decrease privacy; it does foster sociability and impersonality; and it is used by world leaders to communicate and by armies to direct the troops. Many of the changes associated with the telephone were also characteristic of the industrial system as it developed. However, as the example of the Soviet Union shows, the telephone system could have been very different.

Phone books are not made generally available, so unless one knows a person’s number one can call only by using directory assistance, and many important numbers are not given out. The system, therefore, becomes to a great degree one of group communication within closed circles. That philosophy is further expressed in the existence of several segregated telephone networks for different institutions. The most significant is the “key” system which links members of the top elite, and which can only be dialed by someone with a key to unlock the instrument. In the Soviet Union the total of phones on the several segregated networks is apparently greater than that of the public network.²

Our assumptions that telephones and directories would be widely available and that telephones would enhance democracy and the free exchange of information were facets of our culture more than of the technology itself. Yet at the same time, for reasons of privacy and security many U.S. telephone numbers are unlisted and many institutions have private internal directories and central exchanges to control entry. The advantage that may be gained from access to persons or information leads us to sequester and hoard these resources. For computers as much as telephones, demands for information privacy and security may intrinsically be at odds with unrestricted access and free flow of information. It is not a simple task to separate the changes inherent in a new technology from the cultural meanings and restrictions that attach to that technology when it is put to use in a society.

In the above list of forecasts, the computer could easily be substituted for the telephone. This is not a coincidence, as the telephone and the computer can serve similar communication functions. Although a complete phone system was in place in the United States by 1940, many new possibilities for the network have emerged with computers and satellites. The idea of a comprehensive telecommunications system has altered our conception of the telephone as an instrument. A telecommunications network was not imagined when the telephone was introduced, but there was some consideration of the new telephone network’s relationship to the existing telegraph network.

In Online Communities, a study of computer conferences in the office environment, Starr Hiltz has found that new media of communication can either substitute for, add on to, or expand older forms. In the case of the telephone and the telegraph in the United States, the telephone was substituted for the telegraph; in Europe, the two systems coexisted and the telephone system was not as extensive as in the United States. More recently, however, as increasing amounts of text, data, and pictures are transmitted over telephone lines by computers and fax machines, the telephone and telegraph functions are merging in a single system. This was predicted when the telephone was introduced but was impeded for almost a century in our society by the institutional and regulatory separation of the two modes of communication. With the break-up of the AT&T system, the United States is taking a free market course to telecommunications integration. In France, on the other hand, the merging of telegraph, telephone, and teletext networks is proceeding under government sponsorship.

The Telephone Culture

When new inventions are put to use, a unique culture often develops around them. As the telephone came into widespread use a distinctive telephone culture was created. The role of the operator as a source of aid and information in the placing of calls was of great significance. From assisting and eavesdropping on many calls, the local operator became a source for community gossip. The development of automatic switching and telephone directories has gradually limited this interesting role. In the computer culture, the computer bulletin board operator has a similar role.

Another part of telephone culture centers on the etiquette and privacy surrounding telephone conversations. The rules that dictate who can and cannot listen to a call range from customary, though often violated, injunctions not to listen to personal conversations to court-sanctioned regulations governing wiretaps. In early telephone systems, several customers shared the same line and listening in on conversations was not uncommon. With the demise of the shared line we have come to expect telephone privacy; however, children and teenagers often eavesdrop on extension phones. The regulations surrounding wiretap information and its use in criminal proceedings have been subjects of extensive litigation in the courts. Law enforcement agencies continue to press for more extensive wiretap authority. The underlying issue of what constitutes private information and who has access to it reappears in the controversy about computers and privacy.

A telephone conversation can create a unique sense of intimacy and immediacy. The lengthy and frequent telephone conversations of teenagers are one example; pay-per-call adult fantasy services are another. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan saw the telephone as an instrument working against rigid communication hierarchies: “One of the most startling consequences of the telephone was its introduction of a ‘seamless web’ of interlaced patterns in management and decision making. It is not feasible to exercise delegated authority by telephone. The pyramidal structure of job-division and description and delegated powers cannot withstand the speed of the phone to bypass all hierarchical arrangements, and to involve people in depth.”³ To avoid the intrusion and immediate demand of a telephone call, we have invented the unlisted number and the automatic answering machine. Receptionists and secretaries are often used to screen calls. Once caught on the phone, etiquette prevents many of us from hanging up on persistent salespeople or polite strangers. It may even prove difficult to hang up on the talking salescomputer. In the computer culture, electronic mail, conferences, and bulletin boards produce this unique sense of involvement and open new arenas for communication and self-expression.

The Telephone and Social Organization

The technical and organizational problems encountered and resolved in the establishment of the first national telephone networks—problems of equipment standardization and compatibility, line placement, and overlap of service areas—are generic problems ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Technology, Computers, and Society
• 2 A Brief History of Computers
• 3 Computer Culture
• 4 Computers in Organizations
• 5 Computers and Education
• 6 Computers, Politics, and Government
• 7 Computers in Health Care
• 8 Industry, Automation, and Computers
• 9 Artificial Intelligence
• 10 The Progress of Computing Machines
• Index