1

1
Currier & Ives, The Progress of the Century, c.1876
2
1950s
magazine
titles
3
The art of better
living, ca.1940
Lets hope its not too far
awaythat bright new day
when youll know the lift of
living electrically. You can
count on Westinghouse to
turn out all the fine new
appliances you need to banish
that never finished feeling
about housework.
4
The future is plastic
Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife
of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose.
Popular Mechanics, 1957. Miracles youll see in the next fifty years.
5
Television has altered our world...
1. Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its
power as a medium of news and entertainment was then so great that it altered
all preceding media of news and entertainment.
2. Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its
power as a medium of social communication was then so great that it altered
many of our institutions and forms of social relationships.
3. Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its
inherent properties as an electronic medium altered our basic perceptions of
reality, and thence our relations with each other and with the world.
4. Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. As a
powerful medium of communication and entertainment it took its place with
other factors such as greatly increased physical mobility, itself the result of
other newly invented technologies in altering the scale and form of our
societies.
5. Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research, and
developed as a mediumof entertainment and news. It then had unforeseen
consequences, not only on other entertainment and news media, which it
reduced in viability and importance, but on some of the central processes of
family, cultural and social life.
6
Technological determinsim
the technology simply exists and develops in its own way.
The technology is a given, ultimately self-acting with its
own developmental logic.
Technology is abstracted from society, not seen as social
itself.
Logically, the consequences of its development are
dependent on that technology if television hadnt been
invented, then some of the social changes indicated would
not have happened.
2
7
Television has altered
6. Television, discovered as a possibilityby scientific and technical research, was selected for
investment and development to meet the needs of a new kind of society, especially in the
provision of centralised entertainment and in the centralised formation of opinions and
styles of behaviour.
7. Television, discovered as a possibilityby scientific and technical research, was selected for
investment and promotion as a new and profitable phase of a domestic consumer economy;
it is then one of the characteristic machines for the home.
8. Television became available as a result of scientific and technical research, and in its
character and uses exploited and emphasised elements of a possibility, a cultural and
psychological inadequacy, which had always been latent in people, but which television
now organised and came to represent.
9. Television became available as a result of scientific and technical research, and in its
character and uses both served and exploited the needs of a new kind of large-scale and
complex but atomised society.
8
Symptomatic technology
Here, it is the uses of technology, i.e. other, social factors,
which are important in how the world is changed in
response to the development of television.
So television here is a symptom of some other change.
Here, the forces that were changing society would have
found some other means to effect those changes if
television hadnt been invented.
So the technology here is a by-product; again, asocial,
removed from society and therefore self-acting.
For Williams, technological determinism and symptomatic
technology are two sides of an argument which seeks to
abstract technology from society in explaining the role of
technology in social change.
9
Technology without content
Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and
television were systems primarily devised for transmission
and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition
of preceding content. When the question of content was
raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically. There were
state occasions, public sporting events, theatres and so on,
which would be communicatively distributed by these new
technical means. It is not only that the supply of broadcasting
facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of
communication preceded their content.
Williams, p.25
10
What is determination?
We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a
single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real
determining factors - the distribution of power or of capital,
social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size
between groups - set limits and exert pressures, but neither
wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex
activity within or at these limits, and under or against these
pressures.
Williams, p.130
11
Bimbers three faces of technological
determinism
Normative account: when the norms by which a society comes to judge
progress remove ethical and political in favour of the rational and
efficient. Then technology can be seen to be autonomous in this
judgement (though that doesnt mean it is).
Nomological: once a technology is developed it quite naturally creates
further technological developments e.g. railways bring about telegraph.
Each development is the next stage in technological progress.
Unintended consequences: the effects of a technology cannot be
foreseen and so the technology itself must be regarded as socially
neutral and therefore autonomous; it defies social control.
12
Technology as a social (economic)
process
Paradoxically, then, the compelling nature of much technological
change is best explained by seeing technology not as outside of
society, as technological determinism would have it, but as
inextricably part of society. If technological systems are economic
enterprises, and if they are involved directly or indirectly in market
competition, then technical change is forced on them. If they are to
survive at all, much less to prosper, they cannot forever stand still.
Technical change is made inevitable, and its nature and direction
profoundly conditioned, by this. And when national economies are
linked by a competitive world market, as they have been at least
since the mid-nineteenth century, technical change outside a
particular country can exert massive pressure for technical change
inside it.
Mackenzie & Wajcman p.14
3
13
Technology vs. culture
Does culture advance technology or does technology
advance culture? asks one of the written questions lying
before me. It is wrong to put the question that way.
Technology cannot be counterposed to culture for it is the
mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The
growth of technology advances culture. But the science and
general culture that have arisen on the basis of technology
constitute a powerful aid to further growth of technology. Here
we have a dialectical interaction.
Leon Trotsky, 1926, p.229