The Relationship between technology and culture

Okay, this isn't about evolution or creation. At all.Its been prompted by the discussion in the Faith and Belief forum at the moment that has veered into talking about animal tool use. However, it doesn't have any direct relevance to that either; that discussion has merely reminded me of an argument I once had with someone that I now want to discuss.As the title suggests, I want to talk about the relationship between culture and technology. My belief -- which has, with one notable exception, remained untested by serious discussion -- is that the level of technology that a culture has attained at any given time has a direct effect on the possibilities for social organisation and complexity in that group. That doesn't sound contentious to me at all: it seems almost self-evident. If you don't have some method of making written records (preferably portable) then you can't have a complex civil service or tax raising powers. If you don't have ploughs and domesticated animals, then you have to spend a great deal more time labouring in the fields. And so on. New technology effects social restructuring. Easy as that.As I've been intimating, I once mentioned this belief to a very smart history/economics post-grad friend. He disagreed strongly, and said that it was a very simplistic view, because it is very hard to define what technology is exactly. His response was, I think, what about ideas? Is democracy a technology?I wasn't sure, but he seemed to have a point. At the same time, I felt like he wasn't quite getting my argument. Is large scale democracy workable without a portable method of keeping records, and a great many other things besides? I don't know. But I've been thinking about this topic on and off since, and its still bugging me.Some time later, I read an interview with Gibson, the writer of that seminal cyberpunk novel. He professed a similar belief, but he veiled it with a kind of embarassed sounding caveat, as though it was rather a guilty indulgence to believe such a thing.Many of you seem pretty smart. I was just wondering if someone here could put me straight on why this idea stinks?

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

because I think it's some great questions that somehow got pushed off the front page.Any answers/ideas folk?

Okay, I'll bite. While this is an interesting idea I am going to end up agreeing with your friend. To my mind he is correct in stating that it is very simplistic.What do you mean by technology? Microwave ovens and Kevlar may be advanced technologies, yet they do absolutely nothing regarding how humans interact. Likewise certain ideas and social processes (democracy or beauracracy are good examples) have no technological merit yet heavily impact the complexity of how we deal with each other.If you want to run with something like this, it might be better to focus on communications technology. That could even include roadbuilding, cars, and planes.Freedom and multifunctional capacity for communication opens up new ways for humans to interact. The next important question is if "how" they interact will be any different than the old way, other than more global and faster.It is interesting that you noted time saving aspects of technology to mean more time in communication (or interacting), when in fact people now work more than ever. We are actually being made less free.It seems to me the social complexity of court life within any of the feudal societies could be quite complex, and they didn't even have mobile phones. Japan and China were great examples.Maybe what I need to see are more definitions. What do you mean by technology, social organization, and complexity. Heheheh, complexity has yet to be defined in any ID thread so it might be interesting to see it defined here.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

I would agree with that basic idea, but as your history/eco mate said, that idea by itself is a little simplistic. I think it’s important to expand it a little by saying that not all technological advances will affect culture, and that which does affect it, does so to varying degrees. For the record, I am looking at this issue from the perspective of modern Western culture, which I have lived my life within.Say that someone invented some kind of computer that could do finely detailed, long-range predictions of the weather with unfailing 100% accuracy, no surprises at all. That would be quite a clever technological innovation, but would that really have a significant impact on our culture? It might make agriculture more efficient and allow farmers to prevent weather-related damage and plan ahead for less ideal conditions. People could plan vacations to the beach and be certain that they will get perfect weather. Air travel would be safer perhaps. But would it do anything to change our culture as a whole? I personally don’t think so. Aside from some specific advantages to specific facets of our culture, and the world’s meteorologists having to find a new line of work, I don’t think it would change the basis of the lives we live and how we live them, or influence what we find entertaining and stimulating, or how we communicate. It would have some economic effects for sure, but I don’t think it would have any notable effect on our political and social systems.But look at other technologies like the Automobile, television and the internet. They have made big impacts on our everyday culture. The automobile for example, has become quite important in American culture. As well as being something of a personal status symbol to many people, it has affected things like where people decide to live, the physical layout of cities and towns, foreign policy (due to heavy reliance on middle-east oil), and even people’s eating habits (the car culture helped the rise of the fast-food industry). I think in a discussion of this topic, it needs to be made clear what we are referring to when we say Technology. A dictionary definition I just found is science of industrial and mechanical arts. I think that is a good basis to work from. I would consider ideas to be just ideas, and cannot be considered a technology until they are turned into an industrial or mechanical reality. The example of Democracy certainly affects a culture, but I’d define it more as a philosophy or an ideology rather than a technology. In my own words, for me to consider something as being technological, it has to be real and applicable to one or more physical tasks. I don’t think the idea stinks, I think it’s quite interesting but it just needs a bit more detail and clarification. In the general relationship between culture and technology, I would also look at it the other way around. I mean, technology can drive cultural change but cultural influences can also be a driving force behind technological advances. For example, where a culture emphasises importance of business, competition, money and profit, there is a big incentive to look for technological innovation to produce more product at a lower cost.Hopefully, after all that, I’ve given you a few worthwhile things to think about.

Technology does alter culture - it's what I research for a living (particularly how mobile technologies alter people's perceptions of time). However writing about that would be a busman's holiday and frankly I don't do lengthy unless someone is paying for it.Let's try something more simple: Any effect on culture or not?

I would say "of course" but then I would say that. What you are articulating here Tusko is essentially Marx' argment of historical materialism - that as history progresses the technical base of society changes, and as it changes the social superstructure that can be built on that base also changes. As a result, human culture is an evolutionary process, and is directional."The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization. " - KMA good summary of this view is that:
"The material, economic relations of life determine human consciousness (one's way of thinking, one's "sense of reality"), as well as, (a) the particular forms of state and social organization, (b) political and legal structures, and (c) the ruling ideology (the dominant social, political, moral, and aesthetic view of the world)."All social progress is dependant on technical progress.

I did not say it did not alter culture, though I did point out that some technologies won't, and some nontechnologies will.Personally I have been interested in cultural perceptions of time for almost 20 years now (since reading Eviatar Zerubavel's Hidden Rhythms) and so your research sounds particularly interesting to me. My feeling is that mobile technologies have not only altered perceptions of time, but of space as well. Unfortunately I think you just provided a counterexample. The devastation you showed was not unlike the devastation seen after the tsunamis, as well as I'd imagine the destruction of any past historical culture through war, thus could this have a different effect than any of these previous and current low tech devastations?And keep in mind I was reacting to the poster's claim technology allows for greater and more complex interactions. Mass graves hardly create more complex interactions. It is as simple as it gets.The atomic bomb is a patent reminder that technology does not make men wiser or more complex, it just hands brutal men a bigger club.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

I think you are mistaken there Holmes. What the nukes produced was the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, and framed the entire global political framework for the next 50 years. And that has only ended becuase of the absence of a counter-point power, rather than any other developement.Thus, it is definately the case that our culture has been impacted by nuclear weapons. For one thing, it used to back up the inviolability of soveriegn states; millions of people were affected by the balance between the two superpowers, fought out in covert wars in small countries. It inspired art, both heroic and protest; it changed the relationships of power, and hence the socio-political context.

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My feeling is that mobile technologies have not only altered perceptions of time, but of space as well.

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Yes very true - the crux of this area is the interaction between Time,Position, symbol and person. Zerubavel's work on socio-temporal order is pretty interesting - I'll have to dig my copy out.One of the key temporal effect of information system implementation is the elimination of rigidity in working rhythms information technologies help to eliminate or diminish the importance of time-frames generally accepted as appropriate for performing a given activity. (Failla and Bagnara 1992).This sort of supports the work of Barley (1988)who came up with a basic dichotomy of how individuals and cultures organise time: either monochronistic or polychronistic in nature. Monochronistic behaviour is observed when the individual anticipate and plans for events and occurrences by scheduling slots of time and trying to perform one task at a time; polychronistic behaviour in contrast involves the individual working with less of a structure of order and being more accepting of divergence creeping into a schedule.Following from this there is an argument that the developmental stage of the technology will influence how greatly rigidity is reduced and F&B proposed a three stage model of technology development for measure of effect: automation of routine activities, decision support, and virtual reality technology. The higher the stage the more the level of rigidity is reduced.I'm not particularly interested in objective or physiological concepts of time but rather the psychological perception of time.Sort of like Lee -In this research, the temporalities were not described using the standard unit of second, minute and hour. They were presented by the subjects’ own language. If they used the hour in describing their work, we followed. If they told of their time using such terms as after lunch time, in the morning and half a day, we employed them.(Lee 1999)

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Barley, S. R. (1988). On technology, time and social order: technologically induced change in the temporal organization of radiological work. Making time: ethnographies of high-technology organizations. F. A. Dubinskas. Philadelphia, PA., Temple University Press.: 123-169.

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Failla, A. and S. Bagnara (1992). "Information Technology, Decision, Time." Social science information 31(4): 669-681.

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Lee, H. (1999). "Time and Information Technology: Monochronicity, Polychronicity and Temporal Symmetry." European Journal of Information Systems 8(1): 16-26.

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Zerubavel, E. (1981). Hidden rhythms: schedules and calendars in social life. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

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got to love endnote coupled with an internet connection

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This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 22 February 2005 06:54 AM

I think we are talking at cross-purposes here - Holmes seems to looking at social organization and interaction and others are using the term culture in the broader sense?

It doesn't really matter how you define 'technology' because you didn't say that technology was the only influence on culture. If you partition human inventions into 'technological' and 'non-technological', then, wherever you draw the line, there is always a (partial) influence from the technological side. Only in the non-interesting - and absurd - case of drawing the line such that nothing is deemed 'technological', would there (obviously) be no influence from it.I wouldn't say your position is simplistic, it's just not the whole picture (in more than one way, as has been pointed out by others), nor would it have to be, to remain an interesting subject for investigation.{edited to add a comma, that humble, but most useful member of punctuation marks}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 22 February 2005 13:27 AM

Well, I would agree it is not "the whole picture" becuase society A and society B can exist on the stame technical base and construct different superstructures out of those conditions. But I can say that if the technical base changes, the superstructure WILL ALSO be changed. I can also discuss the limits to organisational teqchnique on the basis of technological limits.Probably the poster-child for this sort of debate is comarison to Athenian democracy. It has been fashionable for some time that "pure" or "ideal" direct democracy can only occur in small, physically local groups, becuase of the necessity to attend a single forum. Thus, the argument goes, direct democracy is only possible under those specific conditions. But the advent of the internet means that fora are detached from geographical locality, and thus conceivably a much larger direct democracy can be consructed on the our new technical base.I consider this argument inherently reasonable and am always fascinated by the lengths people go to to appeal to ineffables. The alternate thesis, that political and cultural developement is essentially ethical, or moral, or cultural in the wishy washy sense, all appear rather utopian and idealistic to my eyes.People are the same in every culture and every time. Sure the content of their values is variable, but not in a progressive manner. Technology progresses; indeed, technology may even prompt its own progression.

I think CK has it right that we are talking past each other based on different assumptions of what we are talking about. This is why I think Tusko needs to define exactly what he means by technology, culture, and complexity.I was talking about social organization.As a separate matter I would have to ask if MAD was anything truly new. Threats of extinction based on a superweapon have existed before. Granted this one is much more powerful than those of the past, but it will not be the end of uberweapon construction, use, followed by secrecy and fear.I totally agree it impacted culture, but was it really new? Scale, yes. Nature? Not so sure.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)

So you are saying that the greater the technology the more polychronistic? I am not sure if I can agree with that at all. It will for some people, but in order to supply the demands of those who approach things polychronistically (thus flitting from one purpose to another) others will have to be more secured to timetables to assure work proceeds as expected.I think it may produce a temporal split within society, with some living more rigidly and others more flexibly. It might even mirror economic gaps between rich and poor. I like both, but once I read Zerubavel the world sort of changed for me in that I realized how subjective time was and am fascinated by the differences such perceptions can bring with them. Even what would seem to be the most objective thing in the world... the clicking of a clock... is nothing but a sort of cultural cadence. Others operate just fine in silence.This message has been edited by holmes, 02-22-2005 09:52 AM

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)"...don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)