Internet Studies

In his article “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner discusses a claim that technical things have political qualities. Winner starts by stating an obvious belief that people and nots things have politics but also says that technological advances have been described as democratising, liberating forces. These are political terms.

Winner illustrates two ways in which things may contain political properties:

1. Arrangement of a technological system can be a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority.
2. Certain technologies are inherently political and require certain types of political relationship.

Here are a few selected excerpts from the article:

What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.

Robert Moses’ bridges, after all were used to carry automobiles from one point to another; McCormick’s machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies, however, encompasses purposed beyond their immediate use…

This concept as been discussed in the course before: you review the Internet without considering its social, political and economical perspectives.

What we have here instead of an ongoing social processes in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakeable stamp of political and economic power.

To see the matter solely in terms of cost cutting, efficiency, or the modernization of equipment is to miss a decisive element in the story… The things we call “Technologies” are ways of building order in our world… In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.

That “democracy stops at the factory gate” was taken as a fact of life that had nothing to do with the practice of political freedom. But can the internal politics of technology and the politics of the whole community be so separated?

But as society adapts to the more dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear power, what will be the long-range toll in human freedom?

This is a good question. Winner says that company’s structure cannot be a democratic one if it aims to profit. I can give an example to support that from the opposite direction. In Israel, the kibbutz’s structure was built on a concept of equality. All for one and one for all. One of the reasons that structure has failed was because the kibbutzes were not profitable and many bankrupted and had to be dismantled to become private properties.

One of the last points Winner raises in the article is the prospect of sacrificing civil liberties. This point can be easily transferred to the Internet medium. Governments use “Protecting us, our freedom and our way of life” as a reason to monitor our activities on the web.

Reference: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1986) pp. 19-39