Human needs are conditioned to accommodate technology, not
the other way around. This is one of the
most counterintuitive aspects of our situation.Technology extends human
capacities, and by all rights should therefore facilitate the achievement of
human purposes. And this in fact may be how things work with simple
technologies—tools whose design and operation are entirely transparent. But with the complex and opaque technologies
of post-industrial mass society, the tables are turned, and our purposeful
activity is shaped to fit the requirements of our technology.
Technology structures our lives in ways that accommodate its
own operative requirements. Langdon
Winner called this reverse adaptation. Technologies start out serving specific
human ends or addressing a highly circumscribed set of problems. But once they
come into being, they shape human thought and activity in ways that conform to
the structure and organization of the technology itself. The technological
solution becomes a way of reframing the original problem, and features of the
original problem that do not correspond to the technological solution are
ignored or redefined.
Reverse adaptation has a ratcheting effect, and leads to a sense
irreversibility. The original purpose,
once altered to accommodate the technology, becomes something different. We
can’t go back to simpler times in the past because the operative purposes of
those times no longer exist. Technology has rendered them inert or irrelevant. This
extends to far more than just the fact that the adoption of the automobile
means that we no longer need blacksmiths and livery stables. Entire domains of
potential meaning and purpose fall by the wayside and are replaced.
The ratcheting effect of reverse adaptation creates an
illusion of progress. Our present-day needs and purposes are fitted snuggly to
the operation of present-day technology. Surely the fit is better now than it was with the inferior technology of
the past. But, of course, the needs and purposes of the past were somewhat
different, and aligned just as closely with the operation of the technology of
the time.
Take communication technology as an example. Modern communication technology provides us
with instantaneous and continuous contact with anyone we choose, regardless of who
they are or where they happen to be. As
a result, many people of today’s cellular generation don’t give a second
thought about the propriety of sending a casual acquaintance a poorly crafted
text message about the most inane thought or minor detail of their momentary
experience. The content of a message to
a distant friend is likely to be considerably different when the only mode of contact
is through a currier-delivered letter, perhaps taking weeks to arrive. And the motivation for communication is
considerably different as well. The
popularity of text messaging and internet sites like Twitter suggests that our
ability to communicate instantaneously is generating a perceived need for instantaneous
communication of trivial information—and this blog post is already far too long
and involved for anyone whose attention span has become reverse adapted to accommodate
the punctate superficiality of the Twitterverse.
The larger social and political institutions of
technological society are subject to reverse adaptation as well. What this means is that the ends that these
systems were originally designed to facilitate become transient motives that
fall into obscurity as new technology forces their realignment. The ends
themselves, because they are constantly in flux, constantly being altered by
the presence of new technological means, cease to be a focus at all. "What" and "why"
take a back seat to "how." What we are
doing and, more importantly why we are doing it become irrelevant, completely
overshadowed by the operation of the technology itself. All that matters is whether a new technology
performs its designed function, or whether it performs its function faster,
more efficiently, or with higher precision than a previous version. What the technology actually does—the
ultimate purposes to which it is being directed and the ways in which the whole
of society is being affected by pursuing these purposes—is rarely if ever
considered.
As a result of the narrow focus on the "how" of technology,
reverse adaptation (along with function drift) can lead to a variety of
unintended consequences. In discussing the
unintended consequences of technology, Winner points out two interesting
features: first they are invariably negative. Positive unintended consequences are taken in stride as expected. That a
technological innovation should turn out to provide additional unforeseen
advantages is included as part of the motivation for innovation in the first
place. The second interesting feature of unintended consequences is that they
are not not intended. That is, there is
nothing in the original planning, development, or application of the technology
in the way of intentionally preventing them. Technologies are born into the
world with little or no intentional forethought directed at potential
unexpected consequences. It is in fact impossible to imagine specific consequences
if they are unexpected.
So, technological innovation involves intentionally creating
new technology that is virtually guaranteed to have negative consequences, the
specific form and scope of which we have no way to judge beforehand.
What could possibly go wrong?
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