Tech and Society: The Political Qualities of Technology - Essay Sample

Introduction

In a heated discussion on the social responsibilities of technology in society, one will notice that technical things have political qualities. Various artifacts, including structures, machines, systems of modern material culture, and digital media, are accurately not judged only for their positive and negative side effects environment, not merely for their productivity and contributions of efficiency (Winner, 121). However, one can also judge them for how they can incorporate specific forms of power and authority. The discussion about technology and society, therefore, deserves explicit attention. This paper attempts to evaluate the cultural and social responsibilities of digital technologies, and the hidden political agenda of digital technologies working to serve democratic capitalists.

Understanding technical artifacts in the political language also mean utilizing and integrating the characteristic of critics of large-scale high-technology systems. Throughout history, sculptures, architecture, and artwork are built for political purposes, democracy, freedom, and social justice. The space program, the factory system, television, radio, automobile, telephone, and nuclear power have all shown democratizing and liberating forces. Daniel Boorstin, in his essay on The Republic of Technology, praised television for its ability to cashier presidents, to disband armies, and to build a new democratic world in ways never before imagined, even in the United States (Winner, 121-125). However, most of the innovations may not always accompany the assurance of a free society.

The next section outlines and illustrates how artifacts can embody political properties. The paper presents an example of the invention, arrangement, and design of some technical device or system and how they become a way of settling an issue in the community. It further gives the inherently political technologies and artificial systems that seem to require, or be firmly compatible with political relationships.

Technical Arrangements as Forms of Order

There are about 200 low-hanging overpasses on Long Island that were purposely designed to achieve a specific social effect. In his biography of Moses, Robert A. Caro stated that the master-builder of bridges, parks, roads, and other public works Robert Moses built these overpasses to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. The reasons reflect Moses's social-class prejudice and racial discrimination. Clearly, this shows that Moses designed the roads for recreation and commuting only to automobile owning whites of upper classes, as he called them (Winner, 124-135). Blacks and poor people who customarily used public transit were kept off the roads since the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses. His main intention was to limit racial minorities and low-income groups from accessing Jones Beach, Moses's widely known Public Park. He made sure of this arrangement by refusing a proposed expansion of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach (Winner, 127-132).

Another useful illustration is in the history of 19th-century industrial mechanization. In the middle 1880s, At Cyrus McCormick's reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago, pneumatic molding machines, a new and widely untested innovation, were added to the plant at a value of $500,000 (Winner, 124-130). One would expect in the standard economic interpretation that such a step was taken to modernize the factory and achieve the kind of efficiencies brought by mechanization, but this was not the case. Robert Ozanne, a historian, has shown why the matter must be observed in a broader context. Ozanne noticed that at the moment, Cyrus McCormick II was involved in a dispute with the National Union of Iron Molders (Winner, 125-130). The addition of the new machines was a strategy to do away with or weed out the skilled workers who by then established the union local in Chicago. The new machines, operated by unskilled workers, produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the prior process. At the time the machines were abandoned after three years of use, they had served their purpose, which was the destruction of the union.

Thus, development at the McCormick plant cannot be understood satisfactorily outside the record of workers' attempts to build and control of the labor movement in Chicago during that time. American political history and technological history at that time were deeply intertwined. In matters like those of McCormick's molding machines and Moses's low bridges, one may only see the importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the issues in question. From the illustrations, it is evident that technologies can be used in ways that enhance the authority, privilege, and power of some over others, for instance, the use of television to sell a political candidate.

Inherently Political Technologies

There are beliefs that some technologies are political in a particular way by their nature. In his essay on authority written in 1872, Friedrich Engels shows a remarkable forceful statement of one version of this argument (Winner, 127-135). Answering revolutionaries who believed that power is an evil that ought to be eliminated, Engels launches into a published text in praise of authoritarianism. He maintained that persuasive authority is a necessary condition in the modern industry. To further support his case in the most effective way possible, he tells his readers to imagine that the revolution has already happened. Who could exercise the capitalists' authority over the production and circulation of wealth? He suggested that the authority could only change its form but not disappear.

While examining social patterns that constitute the environments of technical systems, one will find that some devices and systems almost constantly connected to specific ways of organizing authority and power. However, there are revolving questions on how the state of affairs gets derived from an unavoidable social response to intractable features in the subjects themselves. One can also ask if instead, they are patterns imposed independently by a ruling class, governing body, or some other cultural or social institution to advance their own purposes. For instance, the atomic bomb is an inherently political artifact, and its internal social system must be authoritarian (Winner, 121-135). Once it still exists, its fatal properties demand that it be managed and controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all forces that might make its workings unpredictable. The state of affairs is necessarily independent of any more extensive political system in which the bomb gets implanted, independent of the character or regime of its rulers. Democratic states must, therefore, try to find measures to ensure that the social structures and comprehension that characterize the control of nuclear weapons not to spin off or spillover into the country. The bomb is a particular case for the reasons why very rigid relationships of authority are necessary (Winner, 127-135). Artifacts, first and foremost, are built by opinionated humans, like the special arrangement and the inherently political technologies, digital and media technologies all reflect and represent dominant ideologies, cultural values, and beliefs that are meant to increase the social order of one's society.

Information Artifacts and Social Practice

The media industry stands at the center of the daily life, politics, culture, and economy of the modern world. Digital media, television radio, and other media culture provide materials out of which many people in modern media and consumer societies forge their very identities. These identities include a sense of self, sexuality, nationality, a conception of class, and notion of what it means to be male or female, ethnicity, and race (Kellner, 1-3). The media industry is a powerful force in contemporary societies; therefore, it is necessary to understand how they operate in order to grasp mentally, actin, and transform the setting in which individuals live their lives. For many years in the history of America, the media have been vital instruments of political power, forming a terrain in which the political battles are fought. Since they constitute a central force in social life, they provide political manipulation and domination instruments in society. One example of using media representation in favor of the political ideal of control is the crack scare that took place around the African American community from 1986 to 1992 (Kellner, 20-39). This case brings attention to the media industry's institutional discrimination against African American youth in digital media and the role of digital technologies in its process. The biased representation of black youth on TV benefitted republic Americans while suppressed African American who seeks racial equality and democracy.

The political economy has long been neglected in many modes of modern media and cultural studies. Therefore, it is necessary to stress the significance of analyzing the products' texts of media industries within their mode of production and distribution, usually regarded as political economy (Kellner, 13-19). The fact that the generation, distribution, and reception of culture occur within a particular political and economic system, established by relationships between the economy, culture, social institutions and practices, the state, and institutions like the media, there should be keen attention when it comes to political economy. For example, a capitalist economy dictates that laws of the market govern media production in the United States. However, the system's democratic imperatives suggest that the state has some control of media culture. From a political economy perspective, capitalist societies are usually organized according to a dominant production system that structures organizations and practices as per the logic of capital accumulation and commodification (Kellner, 1-9). Cultural production and distribution are, therefore, market-oriented and profitable in such a system. Forces of production, including creative practice and media technologies, are forged according to imperative relations of production; these dominant relations include the maintenance of hierarchical power and the profit imperative. The political economy, therefore, does not only pertain singly to economics, but to the connections between the political, technological, economic, and cultural dimensions of the social setting in which media industries operate.

In the current stage of capitalist power, political economy approaches are grounded in an empirical analysis of the media industry's actual operation, investigating the influence and structuring power of the dominant capitalist economic system and a commercialized cultural system controlled by powerful corporations.

The artifacts produced are often determined by the system of production with structural limits as to what can and cannot be said or shown in media; it also determines the kind of audience effects cultural artifacts may generate (Kellner, 17-25). The news networks' emphasis on breaking news and their need to fill 24/7 news windows constitutes a trend to publicize current events into media spectacles, displacing essential news with sensational political scandal, terror, or natural disasters.

Although the media culture has overwhelmingly supported capitalist value, it is also a place of intense battles between different social groups, genders, classes, and races. Therefore, for one to get hold of the effects and nature of media culture, one should understand that contemporary culture and society are contested terrains. Again media and cultural forms are spaces in which particular conflicts over, political ideology, and poli...