Internet Studies

I had a very hard time trying to read Marcuse’s essay and even struggled with Feenberg’s. Here are some sentences I underlined while reading:

“Value neutral technology turns out to contain a value in itself after all, and that value is pure domination.

“How can merely neutral means favour domination over liberation? Isn’t the neutrality of the means a guarantee of its indifference with respect to end?

“The modern approach, since Machiavelli, focuses exclusively on the machinery of coercion and consent without regard for the purpose of the whole… ambition is now taken no less seriously than true public purpose since both are regarded as merely subjective.

“Marcuse concludes that science and technology need to be reformed at the most fundamental level, the level of technological rationality itself.

“The new technical logos must include a grasp of essences, and technology must be oriented towards realizing inherent potentialities.

“Like Heidegger he [Marcuse] sees technology as more than technical, as more even than political; it is the form of modern experience itself, the principal way in which the world is revealed.

“All this hangs together at the level of pure theory, but concretely, what would a modern techne be like? Marcuse argues that it would incorporate values in its very structure, that it would be essentially oriented towards the good.

“Who is going to invent those principles, and what will they be like?… Marcuse did not believe it possible to replace technology with some sort of mystical unity of man and nature.

“Perhaps Marcuse had more modest ambitions and merely hoped that technology as we know it would be used to enhance rather than destroy life.

“From that standpoint, his [Marcuse] concept of technological rationality cannot be identical with the formal concepts of efficiency and control, but must have a social content as a socially specific pattern of goal orientation.”

I am aware I’m not doing justice to the essay by selecting just these few sentences but these are the ones I was thinking about as I was reading through. I read Machiavelli a few years ago and it is a good example of today’s western essence. Our view of the world and how we choose to live our lives is very subjective, self-centred, oriented about the self. It is an individualistic view where I’m the most important object and I will use whatever I can for self-actualization and advancement. But I digress. Marcuse’s aspiration to have some rationality in technology might be as feenberg says “merely hoped”. How can you reconstruct an already existing concept?

In Langdon Winner’s “Who will be in Space?” we see some similar concepts but also many others. Winner talks about the “end of work” and “end of career”. It is not a new concept. Ten years ago I learnt that there is a good chance the common person will change jobs at least four times during his working life. The concept of one job for life doesn’t exist anymore. People get bored with what they do and go looking for a new endeavour but mostly, we need to keep up-to-date with current technologies. We keep learning new skills all the time.

“People’s orderly role in production was to be rewarded with an equally orderly role in consumption”.

Isn’t the equivalent phrase is “keeping up with the Jones’s”? One of the causes of current society’s many problems is material gain. Because we want stuff, we have to work to be able to get it.

“The ultimate promise of modern society was held to be individual, material satisfaction. Missing from this picture was any attention to collective good and problems.” [emphasis is mine]

Sounds like a concept raised in the previous essay. Western society is built on individualism. Looking after me. What’s in it for me? How high can I climb so everyone could see me? me me me.

“How can people recreate selfhood when everyone is expandable, could become a more serious issue then even the decline of real wages”.

I disagree. Everyone is expendable—now and before. The opposite can create much bigger problems when people think they are indispensable.

Winner also talks about the inevitability of technology and the campaign announcements on decisions that were made for the consumers without asking their opinion. I think it would be great if many of these choices when optional to be decided by the consumer and I think society will benefit from such a thing. But I also think that in some (not many) cases, the consumers help shape what technology becomes dominant.

And for a closing line, here is a sarcastic sentence from Winner I liked:

“How reassuring; evidently the right design is headed our way and again we have not had to lift a finger”.

References:
Andrew Feenberg, Can Technology Incorporate Values? Marcuse’s Answer to the Question of the Age (1998)
A re-assessment of Marcuse’s theory of technology, which might help you put his work in context.

Langdon Winner, ‘Who Will We Be in Cyberspace?’, from The Network Observer 1995