WEEK 10: Information Technology and Society

LECTURE
Robert Crocker - Information Technology and Society

Information technology has great potential to support and enhance sustainability, through the dematerialisation of consumption. BUT this theory has not translated into reality. Companies have largely just used this potential to modify models of demand, production, and consumption. In other words, Victor Lebow's ideas have still to be overturned.

Other benefits are huge in terms of connectivity for the developing world, and advantages for education. This comes with diasdvantages of course, around organised misinformation, propaganda and manipulation.

There are multiple issues around these problems at the design level. Products which are designed, built, sold and used are also eventually discarded or dumped. These processes are usually kept separate or invisible via "shading." The abundance of people with cracked mobile phone screens most likely suggests that they are built to be deliberately breakable?  
Social acceleration and the problems that go with it, is perhaps invisible to younger people? Antidotes to this situation are becoming popular slowly, but the idea that time, money, efficiency and immediacy are of ultimate importance will take some serious effort to counteract.

Tom Hodgkinson's book "How to be Idle" is one of a series of books which discusses some of the historical beginnings of industrial society, shiftwork and the culture of "busy-ness" which now prevails.
 
READING
Campbell & Park (2008) The Social Implications of Mobile Telephony: the rise of personal communication society

Modified version of the Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow, 1943)

This paper argues that the social changes that come out of mobile communication mark a distinctive step in the progression from the age of traditional mass media to a new "personal communication society".
 
With technological development and change comes far reaching and intense social implications which include a mutitude of issues. Connectivity and immediacy, representations of the self (including body image/shape), cyber bullying, and political debate/argument with actual politicians in 140 characters are all parts of the current trends in communication.

 
Changes have resulted across the world each time technology has taken a step forward. Print, radio, cinema, television, internet and mobile/wearable devices have all had a huge impact on the world, as have automobiles, trains and planes.

Personal communication technology has been advancing rapidly for a number of years, and now includes more and more examples of wearability, thus creating an "extension of the self", and supporting greater immediacy and perpetual contact, which seems so important.
 
The authors also note that "in Finland, the mobile phone is commonly referred to as kännykkä, which means ‘an extension of the hand’ (Mäenpää 2000; Oksman and Rautiainen 2003)" - thus devices are more and more becoming forms of symbolic expression.
 
The hierarchy of needs model (Maslow, 1943) as mentioned in week 2, has often been modified in a tongue-in-cheek effort to capture this obsession we have with our portable devices (see image right).

REFERENCES

• Campbell, S., & Park, Y. (2008). The Social Implications of Mobile Telephony: the rise of personal communication society. Sociology Compass, 2(2), 371–387.
• Wadrip-Fruin, N. and Mountfort, N. (2003), The New Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press (eds).