Digital Innovation andCultural Transformation

CCT 205

Professor Gail Benick

Professor Michael Jones

Key Questions

• Are the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolutionary and transformative?

• What impacts or effects are they having on the social, political, economic and cultural spheres?

• How do we think about the nature of such technological developments?

• Is technological change automatic, natural and logical or can we shape technology as it shapes us?

Focus on the New Media &Civic Engagement

• New media are information and communication technologies & their associated social contexts, incorporating– Devices that enable and extend our abilities to

communicate with particular focus on new interactive, multimedia communication systems & convergence of advanced telecommunications, computer & broadcasting networks

– Communication activities or practices we use to develop those devices

– Social arrangements or organizations that form around the devices and practices

Tactical Media

• Who has the power to define reality?

• Use of “do it yourself (DIY) media created from readily available, relatively cheap Internet technology

• “A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on.”– Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 17, 2006

The Social Web: Redefining the Public Sphere?

• New ways of constructing truth

– Blogs, video blogs, YouTube, My Space)

• The sociability of new Web processes are producing new pathways for engagement

• Electronic mobility – horizontal mass media flows

• Blurred distinction between producer and user generated content

• Radical democratization of knowledge; multiple sources and voices

• Rise of counter publics?

Publics and Counter PublicsMichael Warner (2002)

• The public: “a simple totality of people in a particular realm…. It might be the people organized as a nation, commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community.”

• “A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse”

• A counter public exists when “a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a [dominant] public and, in doing so, finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group, but also with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as a public “

– Cultural, anti-state, anti-market

Civic Engagement

• How do counter publics actively engage to increasing their access to the physical (largely communication-related) and spacial resources that are necessary for their effectiveness in a global sphere?

Thinking about Technology: Technological Determinism #1

• Belief that technologies have an overwhelming and inevitable power to drive human interaction and social change

• Focus on the the effects or impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on users, organizations, society

• Science is driver of technological innovation resulting in improvements in society & progress

Technological Determinism &the Information Age #2

• Belief that ICTs bring transformative shifts in society

• Technology seen as independent causal factor

• Technological imperative combines with idea that people react to and accommodate technological change, but do not try to reverse or redirect it

Technological Determinism #3

• Ian Angell, New Barbarian Manifesto (2000)• “A ‘brave new world is being forced upon

unsuspecting societies by advances in information technology.”

• Technological advances happen automatically & have a life of their own

• There is a logic to technological advances which is outside our control

Social Shaping Perspective(Lievrouw, 2002)

• Technologies are continuously remade by what users do with them

• New media technologies both shape and are shaped by their social, economic and cultural contexts

• The shaping is “recombinant”= products of continuous hybridization of both existing technologies and innovations in interconnected technical and institutional frameworks

Recombinant/hybrid metaphorLievrouw, 2002

• ICTs are not determined by an independent, inevitable causality or evolutionary process unique to technology

• Designers, users, regulators take advantage of the current state of technological knowledge and recombine technologies and new knowledge to achieve their particular goals

The Information Society:Advocates

• Y. Masuda – Managing in the Information Society (1990)– Technology drives transformation from industrial to

information society

• C. Leadbeater – Living on Thin Air (1999)– Positive about role of knowledge/ human capital in

Information Society; success=new ideas, constant innovation, enterprise

• Toffler et al. The Information Society (1996) – New technology creates dynamic competition &

challenges to old industries and technologies

The Information Society:Critics

• L. Winner – The Information Society (1996)– Technological changes not novel; false promises of

technology

• Frank Webster – Times of Technoculture (1999)– Darker side – information gathering, documentation, &

surveillance = more administrative efficiency, control & maintenance of power

The Reach of ICTs: Ubiquitous

• Whether everyone has access to the technologies or not, the reach is ubiquitous

• Most sectors are dependent on ICT systems for record keeping, monitoring and transmitting information– Banking, education, law enforcement, military

defence, health care, politics

Shift in Meaning of Network: Then

• More traditional mass media technologies based on large scale production & distribution of messages directed from a few media centres (major cities) out to ‘mass’ audiences

• Smooth & rapid diffusion of information from top of the hierarchy out to the periphery

• Little or no capacity for messages to go the other way = no feedback loop

Point to Point Network: Now

• Network now means interconnection in which many points or nodes (people, groups, machines, collections of information, organizations) may be created or abandoned on an as needed basis at any location in the system

• Any node can be either a sender or receiver of messages or both

• Nodes = ties that are multiple, intersecting and sometimes redundant

Networks Castells (1996)

• “As an historical trend, dominant functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture.”

The Network Society:Characteristics (Barney, 2004)

• Presence of digital technologies forming basic infrastructure of social, political & economic practices

• Networks as basic form of human organization and relationships

The Network SocietyAttributes #1

• Economic base of network society is informational

• Primacy of the generation & distribution of knowledge and information

• Emphasis on continuous technological innovation and flexibility as source of economic growth

The Network SocietyAttributes #2

• The economy is organized globally

• Capital, commodities & information not contained within national boundaries

• Regions, cities, firms, individual workers are reconstituted as flexible, temporary networks of varying degrees of power

The Network SocietyAttribute #3

• Time and space mediated by technology

• “Timeless time” and “space of flows” (Castells, 1998)

The Network SocietyAttribute #4

• Power and powerlessness are a function of access to networks and control over flows

• Networks acts as gatekeepers

• Some networks and nodes are more powerful than others

The Network SocietyAttribute #5

• Tension between the abstract perception of being placeless and the concrete desire of people to be grounded in a particular place

• Disjuncture between globalizing technology and local identity

• In response, movements emerge to re-establish the local