History

Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology, a Metaphor, and a Story

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 66 Comments

Dr. Melvin Kranzberg was a professor of the history of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founding editor of Technology and Culture. In 1985, he delivered the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in which he explained what had already come to be known as Kranzberg’s Laws — “a series of truisms,” according to Kranzberg, “deriving from a longtime immersion in the study of the development of technology and its interactions with sociocultural change.”

I’ll list and summarize Kranzberg’s laws below, but first consider this argument by metaphor. Kranzberg begins his address by explaining the terms of the debate over technological determinism. He notes that it had become an “intellectual cliche” to speak of technology’s autonomy and to suppose that “the machines have become the masters of man.” This view, which he associated with Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner, yielded the philosophical doctrine of technological determinism, “namely, that technology is the prime factor in shaping our life-styles, values, institutions, and other elements of our society.”

He then noted that not all scholars subscribed to “this version of technological omnipotence.” Lynn White, Jr., for example, suggested that the technology “merely opens a door, it does not compel one to enter.” This is a compelling metaphor. It captures the view I’ve taken to calling “technological voluntarism,” technological determinism’s opposite. Technology merely presents an opportunity, the choice of what to do with it remains ours. Yet, while working with an element of truth, this view seems ultimately incomplete. And by pursuing the open door metaphor itself, Kranzberg suggests the inadequacy of a view that focuses too narrowly on the initial choice to use or not to use a technology:

Nevertheless, several questions do arise. True, one is not compelled to enter White’s open door, but an open door is an invitation. Besides, who decides which doors to open-and, once one has entered the door, are not one’s future directions guided by the contours of the corridor or chamber into which one has stepped? Equally important, once one has crossed the threshold, can one turn back?

Those are astute and necessary questions, and all the more evocative for the way they play off of White’s metaphor. These questions, and the answers they imply, lead Kranzberg to the formulation of his First Law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” By which he means that,

“technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances.”

Here are the remaining laws with brief explanatory notes:

Second Law: Invention is the mother of necessity. “Every technical innovation seems to require additional technical advances in order to make it fully effective.”

Third Law:  Technology comes in packages, big and small. “The fact is that today’s complex mechanisms usually involve several processes and components.”

Fourth Law: Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions. “… many complicated sociocultural factors, especially human elements, are involved, even in what might seem to be ‘purely technical’ decisions.” “Technologically ‘sweet’ solutions do not always triumph over political and social forces.”

Fifth Law: All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant. “Although historians might write loftily of the importance of historical understanding by civilized people and citizens, many of today’s students simply do not see the relevance of history to the present or to their future. I suggest that this is because most history, as it is currently taught, ignores the technological element.”

Sixth Law:  Technology is a very human activity-and so is the history of technology. “Behind every machine, I see a face–indeed, many faces: the engineer, the worker, the businessman or businesswoman, and, sometimes, the general and admiral. Furthermore, the function of the technology is its use by human beings–and sometimes, alas, its abuse and misuse.”

There is a good deal of insight packed into Kranzberg’s Laws and much to think about. I’ll leave you with one last tidbit. A story recounted by Kranzberg to good effect:

A lady came up to the great violinist Fritz Kreisler after a concert and gushed, “Maestro, your violin makes such beautiful music.” Kreisler held his violin up to his ear and said, “I don’t hear any music coming out of it.” You see, the instrument, the hardware, the violin itself, was of no use without the human element. But then again, without the instrument, Kreisler would not have been able to make music.

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Making Sense Out of Life: Early Modern and Digital Reading Practices

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

When I wrote the About page for this blog I cited an article by Alan Jacobs from several years ago in which he likened blogs to commonplace books. Commonplace books, especially popular during the sixteenth century when printing first began to yield an avalanche of relatively affordable books, served as a means of ordering and making sense out of the massive amounts of information confronting early modern readers. As is frequently noted, the dismay and disorientation they experienced is not altogether unlike the angst that sometimes accompanies our recent and ongoing digital explosion of available information. And so, taking a cue from Jacobs, I intended for this blog to be something akin to a commonplace book.

As it turned out, the analogy was mostly suggestive. Much that I write here does not quite fit the commonplace genre. Nonetheless, something of the spirit, if not the law, persists. The commonplace genre would find a nearer kin in Tumblr than in traditional blogs.

In a 2000 essay reprinted in The Case for Books (2009), historian of the book Robert Darnton also reflects on commonplace books and the scholarly attention they attracted. The attention was not misplaced.  Commonplace books offered a window into the reading practices and mental landscape of their users; and for an era in which they were widely kept, they could offer a glimpse at the mental landscape of whole segments of society as well.  In the spirit of the commonplace book, here are some excerpts from Darnton’s essay with a few reflections.

Describing the practice of commonplacing:

“It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book.  They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks.

Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality.”

What is only a parenthetical aside in Darnton’s opening paragraphs was for me a key insight. Darnton’s description of commonplacing could easily be applied to the forms of reading practiced with digital texts, all the way down to the personalization. What is missing, of course, and this is no small thing, is the public or social dimension.

On what commonplace books reveal:

“By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selections into patterns reveal an epistemology at work below the surface.”

That last sentence could easily function as a research paradigm for analysis of social media. Map the “elective affinities” of what Facebook or Twitter or Google+ users link and post and the emergent patterns will be suggestive of underlying epistemologies. Although here again the social dimension complicates the matter considerably. The “elective affinities” on display in social networking sites are performative in a way that private commonplacing was not, thus injecting a layer of distorting self-reflexivity.  But, then, that performative dimension is interesting on its own terms.

Commonplacing as reading for action:

“But they read in the same way — segmentally, by concentrating on small chunks of text and jumping from book to book, rather than sequentially, as readers did a century later, when the rise of the novel encouraged the habit of perusing books from cover to cover. Segmental reading compelled its practitioners to read actively, to exercise critical judgment, and to impose their own pattern on their reading matter. It was also adapted to ‘reading for action,’ an appropriate mode for men like Drake, Harvey, [etc.] and other contemporaries, who consulted books in order to get their bearings in perilous times, not to pursue knowledge for its own sake or to amuse themselves.”

Again the resemblance between early modern reading practices as described by Darnton and digital reading practices is uncanny. The rise of sustained, linear reading is often attributed to the appearance of printing. Darnton, however, would have us connect sustained, cover-to-cover reading with the later rise of the novel. In this case, the age of the novel stands as an interlude between early modern and digital forms of reading which are more similar to one another than either is to reading as practiced in the age of the novel.

The idea of “reading for action” is also compelling as it suggests the agonistic character of both early modern English politics and early 21st century American politics. I suspect that a good deal of online reading today is done in the spirit of loading a gun. At least this is often the ethos of the political blogosphere.

Nonetheless, Darnton would have us see that this form of reading, at least in its early modern manifestation, had its merits in what it required from the reader as an active agent.

Finally, on reading and the attempt to make sense of out of experience:

“… we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities — that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter.”

Early modern Britons and those of us who are living through the digital revolution (an admittedly overplayed phrase) share a certain harried and anxious disposition. It was, after all, the early modern poet John Donne, who wrote of his age, “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” Early moderns deployed the commonplace book as a means of collecting some of the pieces and putting them together once more. If we follow the analogy, and this is always a precarious move, it would suggest that the impulses at work in contemporary digital commonplacing practices — which have not only written information, but lived experience as the field from which fragments are culled — are deeply conservative. They would amount to an effort to impose order on the chaotic flux of live.

Capitalism, Magic, and Technology

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

In his chapter on the “cultural preparation” for the age of the machine in Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford cites, among other phenomenon, capitalism and magic. Here’s the abridged version:

“Thus although capitalism and technics must be clearly distinguished at every stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon it.”

“It was because of certain traits in private capitalism that the machine — which was a neutral agent — has often seemed, and in fact has sometimes been, a malicious element in society, careless of human life, indifferent to human interests.  The machine has suffered for the sins of capitalism; contrariwise, capitalism has often taken credit for the virtues of the machine.”

“… indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, introduced an element of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating them in an appropriate social pattern.”

“Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and technology, there is an intermediate station: that of magic. It was in magic that the general conquest of the external environment was decisively instituted.”

“In sum, magic turned men’s minds to the external world: it suggested the need of manipulating it: it helped create the tools for successfully achieving this, and it sharpened observation as to the results.”

“As children’s play anticipates crudely adult life, so did magic anticipate modern science and technology …”

“… magic was the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engines of fulfillment.”

Capitalism, magic, and technology — an odd grouping at first blush, but less so upon further reflection. The common denominator? Human desire — its generation, manipulation, and satisfaction.

Interestingly, this was a confluence of influences (sans capitalism) also eloquently articulated by C. S. Lewis, a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance literature, in The Abolition of Man:

I have described as a `magician’s bargain’ that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique ….

Fatal Nostalgia and Generalized Anxiety: Signs of the Times

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

“At the end of the eighteenth century people began to be fearful of extended sojourns away from home because they had become conscious of the threat posed by nostalgia. People even died of nostalgia after having read in books that nostalgia is a disease which is frequently mortal.”  — Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia”

No need to read that again, you read it correctly the first time.

Whatever else we may say, this is clearly something very different than what you felt when you recently learned that MTV turned 30 (and didn’t tell anybody) or when you watch Mad Men. It is also different than the nostalgia which infuses the Pottery Barn catalogue, drives popular segments of “contemporary” music, and inspires playful design concepts. It is also quite different from nostalgia animating the handle-bar mustached mixologists populating trendy urban bars. In fact, it is very different from most of what we tend to label nostalgic. And as you may have noted yourself, there is quite a bit that we might label nostalgic all about us. This is not exactly a sudden development, the “vintage” turn has been around for a decade or two at least, but it certainly does seem to be permeating experience to ever greater degrees lately.

And yet the burgeoning nostalgia industry is only distantly related to the reportedly fatal nostalgia described in the opening lines and which Richard Terdiman, in his study of the nineteenth century memory crisis, labeled, with a dash of hyperbole perhaps, a “dangerous epidemic.” This earlier, acute nostalgia occasioned by  prolonged journeys away from one’s home was, owing to its physiological symptoms, treated as a medical condition. This may at first seem quaint and evoke the image of Victorian fainting couches, but let’s not rush to judgment without asking some questions. Why an outbreak of nostalgia, and why then? Why the severity? And how is it that “nostalgia” was subsequently domesticated and even commodified?

As per usual, I’m thinking out loud here, and raising questions to offer what are at best only suggestive responses. It would seem that any response to the first and second questions would take into consideration the ongoing and multiple disruptions of settled agrarian life which characterized the long nineteenth century. What is interesting about nostalgia, then, is that it appears as a symptom of sociological change. It registers the psychic consequences of the onset of modernity and the subsequent disorder introduced into the human experience of time and place. Eventually, what is initially experienced as an acute disorder becomes generalized and to some extent domesticated. That it is later commodified should be of little surprise; there is nothing the market can’t and won’t price. So the “vintage” turn in contemporary society might be understood as a distant ripple  of an original, profound disturbance in the experience of time and place occasioned by rapid social, economic, technological, and political transformations.

I suggested earlier that we not too quickly dismiss the epidemic of nostalgia. Here’s why. Nostalgia was then a psychological condition with physiological consequences brought about by the rapid disintegration of the social order. This led me to wonder if we might find anything analogous in our own experience. With all of the provisionality a blog post entails, perhaps we need look no further than the epidemic of anxiety. Anxiety too is a psychological condition with physiological consequences and, it could be argued, is also generated by sudden social shifts and disruptions. Anxiety is to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century what nostalgia was to the long nineteenth century — a symptom of social change.

My sense is that anxiety is well on the way to generalization and commodification. But will it ever be chic?

“Archival Consciousness”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

From Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis:

“[Walter Benjamin] argued that the nineteenth-century city produced a particularly acute experience of disconnection and abstraction. Such abstraction defeats the associative structure of natural memory and induces in its place a different form of the habitus or technology of recollection that we could call ‘archival consciousness.’ Its principle would be the increasingly randomized isolation of the individual item of information, to the detriment of its relation to any whole, and the consignment of such information to what earlier I called ‘extrindividual’ mnemonic mechanisms. Such abstraction has been increasingly programmed by the practices of modern socio-economies since the industrial revolution.”

Is the structure of this 19th century “memory crisis”  recapitulated within the further abstractions of memory within 21st century digital culture?