THE INFORMATION SOCIETY ASMEGA-MACHINE
The Continuing Relevance of Lewis Mumford
1
Christopher May
University of West of England, Bristol
Abstract
Too often the history of information and communication technologies (ICTs) iswrenched out of the history of technology and presented as something altogetherseparate and therefore different, rendering previous analyses irrelevant. However,there are sufcient analytical tools to hand without the continual invention of new paradigms to understand the current stage of technological advance. Tosupport this contention, in this article, the continuing relevance of LewisMumford is explored. Mumford’s discussion of the megalopolis and the emer-gence of the invisible city as its most developed state make a direct link with thenetworked information society, establishing a link between the informationsociety and Mumford’s analysis of the previous history of technology. At the centreof Mumford’s discussion of this history is the dialectic interaction of authoritarianand democratic technics. Mumford’s notion of technics stresses that technolo-gies can not be divided from the social relations in which they appear. In theinformation society, this dialectical pair map onto the twin dynamics of enclosureand disclosure. The former dynamic represents the control of informationthrough commodification and marketization, the latter the recognition of theempowering and emancipatory qualities of ICTs. Up until now, discussions of theinformation society have regarded only one or other dynamic as normal, whereasutilizing Mumford’s insight, the contradictory character of the information societycan be theorized without rendering the second dynamic abnormal. Thus, thearticle concludes that recourse to Mumford’s ideas, to re-embed ICTs in thehistory of technology, allows a more nuanced and fruitful treatment of currentdevelopments in information society.
Keywords
authoritarian and democratic technics, History of technology,Information Society, Lewis Mumford
The inventors of...computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologicallyinated by a similar myth of unqualied power, boasting through their science of their increasingomnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational thanthose of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that system itself must be expanded,at whatever eventual cost to life.(Mumford 1964: 5)
Information, Communication & Society
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online © 2000 Taylor &Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Information, Communication & Society
3:2 2000241–265
INTRODUCTION
It has become a conventional wisdom that technological revolutions produceprofound shifts in social relations. Relating to information technologies,this argument nds its most recent adherents in Charles Leadbeater (1999) andBill Gates but, can trace its origins back to speculations regarding the impact of the telephone or even the printing press. Information and communicationtechnologies (ICTs) and, their networking capacity (most readily manifest onthe Internet) may be having considerable social, political and economic effects, but nevertheless there is an urgent need to re-integrate the information societyand its technological apparatus into an understanding of the continuing historyof technology which does not suppose contemporary developments areunprecedented. Too often the history of ICTs is wrenched out of the history of technology and presented as something altogether separate and thereforedifferent, rendering previous analyses irrelevant. However, there are sufcientanalytical tools to hand without the continual invention of new paradigms tounderstand the current stage of technological advance.
2
To support thiscontention, below I outline the continuing relevance of one particular analyst of technology: Lewis Mumford. After a brief overview of Mumford’s work, I discusssome of his ideas regarding technology and suggest their relevance to thecontemporary emergence of the information society.
WHO IS LEWIS MUMFORD?
Lewis Mumford was born in 1895 in Flushing, New York and died at home inAmenia, New York aged 95 having written over thirty books, countless articlesand reviews. Mumford spent his youth in New York, walking around the city,watching construction and exploring the growing metropolis. Indeed as Goistpoints out, ‘the city was the very stuff of his life’ well before he became seriouslyinterested in studying cities (Goist 1972: 380). Yet, the young Mumford was alsointerested in technology. His rst published article, aged thirteen and promptinga royalty cheque for 25 cents, was in
Modern Electrics
on new breakthroughs inradio receivers, reecting his own interest in building and experimenting withradios (Miller 1989: 34). After the end of the First World War, Mumford studiedwith Thorstein Veblen at the New School of Social Research, who became botha friend and one of his major inuences. He also discovered the work of PatrickGeddes (the Scottish botanist and social philosopher) with whom he correspondeduntil Geddes death in 1931. It was Geddes inuence that led Mumford to thinkabout the role of cities in the history of mankind.Mumford was interested in the human possibilities that sprang from man’s
CHRISTOPHER MAY 242
organization into cities, possibilities which he observed were often compromised.Therefore, he sought to establish a more humane approach to the developmentand planning of cities. To this end, for some years he wrote a column in the
New Yorker
which aimed to widen the debate on architecture and planning (specicallyin New York but, also more generally). For Mumford, the key problem, revealed by man’s organization into cities, was the impact of technology. Increasingly, hestudied the historical role of technology, and explored its impact on socialrelations (and their impact on technology). While Mumford was not so much ahistorian as a synthesizer of disparate ideas and analyses, Jamison has claimed his book,
Technics and Civilization
:
Created a new field of study: history of technology...Mumford succeeded in placingtechnological development in human context; after Technics and Civilisation, the debate abouttechnology moved to a new level of constructive ambition and seriousness. It would never bequite the same again.(Jamison 1995)
Especially after the 1950s, Mumford’s focus shifted almost completely tothe issue of man’s relation with technology and, the problem that technologyseemed to be running ‘out of control’. Mumford was not in any way atechnological determinist but, despite some clear parallels between Mumfordand the ‘social-embeddedness-of-technololgy’ approach, he did not merely holdan earlier version of this paradigm. Indeed, Lewis Mumford is a singular characterand part of no ‘school’. Though he did experience the earlier stages of theinformation ‘revolution’, he died on the eve of the information technologicalacceleration of the 1990s. Thus, the interpretation I develop below appliesMumford’s ideas to a technological history he did not fully experience. However,the central argument of this article is that his approach remains relevant to thisrecent history.Mumford’s perspective on the history of technology was informed by hisinterests and political views but, as importantly by his emphasis on ‘symbolicactivities’. He resisted the commonplace material analysis of technologicaladvances, an account linking a series of material technologies with little regardfor their symbolic values or importance. Indeed, for Mumford the:
Constant danger in interpreting human behaviour is to overvalue exact methods and measurabledata, separated from their historical context: data often too complex for even verbalformulation; for the very things that the conscientious historian is tempted to leave out, becauseof their obscurity, their purely analogical suggestiveness, their subjective involvement, areneeded to bring any richness into our judgements.(Mumford 1962: 202)
THE INFORMATION SOCEITY AS MEGA-MACHINE243
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