Rethink, Retool, Reboot

Simon Trace

• Publisher: Practical Action Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780449050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Technology underpins human development. We need it to provide the very basics of a minimum standard of life – food, water, shelter, health and education. But a significant proportion of the world's population do not have these basics today. And whilst a fifth of the world's population lacks access to technologies fundamental to a basic standard of living, unfettered use of technology by those who have it brings its own problems – including pollution, global warming and threats to the sustainable future of humanity. So why are we so slow to address these issues? Why is it that the drivers of innovation mean we are more likely to see research into a cure for male baldness than a malaria vaccine or into methods for extracting shale gas as opposed to solutions to store renewable energy? We need to rethink the purpose of our technological endeavour and how we provide access to and govern the use of technology today. We need to retool – to change the alignment of our innovation systems to deliver technology that is socially useful and addresses the key challenges of poverty and environmental sustainability. Above all, our relationship with technology needs a reboot. We need a different frame of reference – Technology Justice – to provide a radically different approach to our oversight and governance of the development and use of technology. Rethink, Retool, Reboot addresses vital questions regarding the future of our world and the people living in it. It should be read by academics, students, activists and all those interested in international development and the environment.

PART I: RETHINK

Why technology is not working for human development or environmental sustainability and why things need to change

CHAPTER 1

Defining technology and technological progress

It is primarily through the growth of science and technology that man has acquired those attributes which distinguish him from the animals, which have indeed made it possible for him to become human.

Arthur Holly Compton

This book is about technology injustice. It shows that the way we govern access to, development, and use of technology is unfair and, ultimately, unsustainable. It is also about how a principle of Technology Justice offers a different way of looking at technology and insight into how technology could be used to create a sustainable and equitable future for everyone. Before those ideas can be explored in depth, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the term ‘technology’ in this book. It is also important to describe briefly some of the debates around the notion of what constitutes technological progress, how it occurs, and the social dimensions of technology, in order to understand how conventional views of technological progress as both inevitable and progressive may not be helpful.

Defining technology

The word ‘technology’ is open to wide interpretation. Today it seems to be most often used to refer to electronic gadgets, mobile phones, and the internet. A quick analysis of the topics of articles on the online technology pages of four major news agencies on the day of writing this chapter (Figure 1.1) supports this assertion.

Figure 1.1 Headlines for news feeds on ‘technology’

Source: Word cloud produced from analysis of the topics of all articles on the first pages of the online news pages on ‘Technology’ from the BBC, CNN, Sky, and the Telegraph newspaper on 14 May 2015.

This book takes the view that technology extends far beyond this limited field to include traditional indigenous technologies and knowledge as well as the vast array of technology and technical knowledge that underpins the high standard of living achieved in the developed world today.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following to say about the origins of the word:

The term ‘technology’, a combination of the Greek technē (‘art’ or ‘craft’) with logos (‘word’ or ‘speech’), meant in ancient Greece a discourse on the arts, both fine and applied. When it first appeared in English in the 17th century, it was used to mean a discussion of the applied arts only, and gradually these ‘arts’ themselves came to be the object of the designation. By the early 20th century, the term embraced a growing range of means, processes, and ideas in addition to tools and machines. By mid-century, technology was defined by such phrases as ‘the means or activity by which man seeks to change or manipulate his environment’. (Buchanan, 2014)

As the encyclopaedia notes, such a broad definition fails to distinguish between technological activity and scientific inquiry. It also has the potential to incorporate forms of organization such as political systems and markets. This may be why there has been a narrowing in how the term is generally used, at least in common speech, in recent decades. Use of the term ‘high technology’ was first noted in English in the early 1960s to refer to the practical applications of modern science and, by the early 1970s, this had been shortened to ‘high-tech’ (Harper, 2015). It is probably as a result of the usage and connotations of ‘high-tech’ that the word ‘technology’ is today more likely to be associated with information and communication technologies – computers, telephones, applications of the internet, and so on – as Figure 1.1 confirms.

In this book, by contrast, the word ‘technology’ is taken to refer to the tools, machinery, artefacts, and systems of technical knowledge that humans use to interact with the natural environment and each other. This encompasses technology based on recent science and, equally, tools, practices, or techniques based on traditional knowledge, for example: a horse-drawn plough, an Archimedes screw,¹ and traditional techniques for the selection and breeding of seeds or the control of soil erosion. To provide some practical limits to the subject, though, the definition used here does not extend to what could be described as non-technical systems of knowledge, such as political or managerial systems and practices.

The idea of technological progress

Technology is often presented in the media and everyday discussion in the abstract – the rational outcome of the application of the latest science to a real-world problem. A common view of the relationship between humans and technology is of a historical and linear progression with humanity constantly inventing and innovating to achieve ever higher levels of wellbeing. This idea that modernization comes about or is evolved through access to ever more sophisticated levels of technology has, together with the concept of economic growth, underpinned ideas of development for the last century.

Reality is a bit messier than this. Technology is a product of human interactions and the use and innovation of technology inevitably reflects the political, social, and cultural nature of the societies from which it emerges. Moreover, human beings shape and, in turn, are themselves shaped by technology. That ‘messiness’ means that, in reality, technological progress is not as linear or inevitable as we might like to believe and its social impact not as easy to predict as we would wish.

Questioning technological determinism and the inevitability of technological progress

In his book Science and Technology for Development the Edinburgh-based academic Professor James Smith traces how views of development through technological progress have changed over the years. In the 1960s, one school of thought saw development in terms of a linear process of modernization, whereby countries pass through a five-stage model from ‘traditional society’ via industrialization to an ‘age of mass consumption’ with ‘widespread affluence, urbanisation and the consumption of consumer durables’. More recently, the alternative idea of ‘technological catch-up’, whereby countries can develop their skills base and use new technologies to leapfrog stages of the linear model to catch up or even overtake richer, ‘leader’ countries, has been something ‘that many countries aspire to’ (Smith, 2009: 14–17). The mobile phone is often cited as an example of technological leapfrog, with many developing countries virtually abandoning the costly extension of landline services into rural areas in favour of the more flexible and less capital-intensive mobile phone, but the idea could equally apply to leapfrogging whole stages of industrialization.

This vision of constant technological progression can lead to a sense of technological determinism – a belief that certain inventions have within them the seed of an inexorable chain of events. For example, that the efficiency of the wheel must inevitably lead to its universal adoption, that the development of the gun must lead to the abandonment of spears and swords, or that the introduction of the combustion engine must spell the end of horse-drawn transport and ploughs. Many social scientists, however, do not see technological ‘progress’ as such a linear or inevitable affair. David Nye, for instance, cites three counterfactuals to the above examples:

• The Japanese abandoning guns for cultural reasons after adopting them from Portuguese traders in the middle of the 16th century, not picking them up again until the mid-19th century (the Samurai preferred swords and arrows, which had more symbolic meaning for them).

• The present-day Amish community’s rejection of modern transport and agricultural technology in favour of the horse-drawn cart and plough in the USA.

• Evidence that the Mayans and the Aztecs knew of the wheel (they put them on toys and ceremonial objects) but that they did not use wheels in construction or transportation.

Nye goes on to suggest that it is cultural choices rather than any inherent logic or usefulness of particular technologies that determine whether or not they are adopted: ‘in short, awareness of particular tools or machines does not automatically force a society to adopt them or to keep them’ (Nye, 2006: 18–20).

This view of culture shaping technological choices is echoed more recently in rejections of programmes for childhood vaccination against polio in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan, culminating in the murder of 26 polio workers in Pakistan and 10 in Nigeria in 2013. The reasons behind this rejection appear complex and while, in some cases, doubt over the efficacy of the vaccine itself seems to be part of the rationale for parents refusing to have their children vaccinated, other factors also play a part. These include suspicion of a programme addressing a disease not viewed locally as a health priority and, in areas of conflict and active insurgency, a boycott of the programme being a means to assert power and challenge government authority (Baron and Magone, 2014).

The impact of culture can also be seen in the regular use of multiple fuels and stoves for cooking, known as ‘fuel stacking’ in the developing world. Many households routinely use two or more fuels. Studies in Latin America show that even households that have switched to liquefied petroleum gas for most of their cooking still rely on less efficient and more polluting stoves or even open fires to cook certain foods, for example the daily staple tortilla. Similar patterns of use have been documented in Asia and Africa. Although some of this behaviour can be linked to household income and the cost of fuel for the improved cook-stoves, cultural issues associated with preferred cooking practices or taste are also cited as reasons for not adopting the cleaner, healthier, and more efficient cook-stoves for all cooking tasks (SE4All, 2013).

Culture can be seen as an influence not only on the behaviour of consumers, determining what technologies are adopted and used, but also on technology producers and investors, determining what technologies are offered for adoption in the first place. Social relationships and ties between producers and financiers in a market, for example, can play a more important role than the efficacy of a technology itself in determining what technologies are brought to market. Jamie Cross’s exploration of the history of the development and large-scale uptake of a simple solar lantern manufactured under the brand of ‘d.light’ is a good example of this (Cross, 2013). The d.light is aimed at poor consumers in the developing world who have no access to mains electricity. It is a low-cost and robust electric light with an LED bulb and a built-in rechargeable battery and solar panel. Founded in 2006, the d.light company had sold over 6 million units by 2014, outstripping most other solar lantern manufacturers in the process (d.light, 2014). According to Cross, the success of the d.light lamp was not due to technical superiority over oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I: Rethink: Why technology is not working for human development or environmental sustainability and why things need to change
• Part II: Retool: Driving innovation to develop the right technologies
• Part III: Reboot: Building a different approach to the governance of technology
• Epilogue: Is small beautiful?
• Appendices