Foundations of Computing and

Communication

Lecture 9

Information Technology in Theory

Based on The Foundations of Computing and the Information Technology Age, Chapter 7

Lecture overheads c© John Thornton 2010

Lecture Objective

To gain a general theoretical understanding of the concept of

information technology and its role in social organisation and

control.

Overview of Topics

• Taking a Critical Stance

• Defining Technology

• The Connection between Science and Technology

• Information Technology

• Networks and Hierarchies

• What is Information Technology?

1

Part One: What is Technology?

2

Understanding Technology

• We cannot understand information technology in isolation.It is embedded in a much wider technological system thathas been evolving with great speed since the advent of theindustrial revolution.

• Because technology is such an overarching aspect of modernlife it is difficult to step back and see it as something distinctor separate from the fabric of everyday living.

• It is easy to point to technological objects. But we are look-ing into the basic nature of technology, to see what its fun-damental characteristics are.

3

Prevailing Views

• Within the mass media and the institutions and organisa-

tions of contemporary society the existence of technology

and technological development is considered to be the nor-

mal state of the world and as something like the natural order

of human social evolution.

• Technology is portrayed as neutral, as something we use to

make our lives better, not as something that uses us or that

has some kind of independent character.

4

The Natural Order

• This identification with the status quo has been the normal

state of human society throughout history (except in times

of dramatic change and revolution). So, for example, in

the slave owning cultures of the past it was accepted as a

matter of course that slaves and slavery were also part of the

“natural order.”

• It is this uncritical acceptance of the prevailing norms that

holds a society together, for if the people come to disbe-

lieve in the value of their own social structures, then these

structures will sooner or later change and disintegrate.

5

Criticising Technology

• The mass media continually reminds us about pollution, global

warming, the proliferation of weapons, the ethics of human

cloning, etc.

• This kind of criticism is not directed towards technology it-

self, or the path we have taken. It is only interested in

correcting obvious mistakes.

• Such corrections typically involve the further development of

new technologies to counteract the effects of the old ones.

• To get behind this technological mindset involves going against

the stream of prevailing thought and opinion. This is not so

easy, as we all tend to “fall in line” with the atmosphere or

zeitgeist of our times.

6

Martin Heidegger (1886-1976)

The Question Concerning Technology

• Heidegger saw technology as a form of “revealing” that fun-damentally shapes our experience of being in the world.

• Technology is a “setting upon” of nature that “challengesforth” energies to be harnessed and put to practical use.

• In this process, all nature, including humanity itself, becomesa “standing reserve,” i.e. something that is only waiting tobe put to use.

• Thus, we are caught within the technological revealing andourselves become “enframed” even as we try to enframe therest of nature with our technological methods.

• Nature, once the source and provider of life, has becomesomething we “order up” at weekends when we are tired ofthe excesses of our technological lifestyle.

7

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)

The Technological Society

• Ellul is famous for being a “technological determinist” i.e. forputting forward the idea that technological development hasbecome autonomous, and that the evolution of civilisation isnow controlled by the internal logic of a global technologicalsystem and not by any government, corporation or individual.

• To arrive at this view, Ellul detailed how our everyday actionsand decisions have become ruled by the application of tech-niques. By identifying technology with technique, he showedhow technology determines our lives by imposing a rationalorder on the way our society is organised.

8

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

The Myth of the Machine

• Mumford argued that the development of science led to aform of rational thinking that only acknowledges the validityof quantifiable and objective facts in the world.

• He connected this concentration on the objective with thedevelopment of technology and with the growth of the mod-ern materialistic outlook.

• He traced how scientific materialism has displaced the earlierartistic and religious perspectives that placed human subjec-tivity at the centre of existence.

• This emphasis on the scientific, material and quantifiable as-pects of experience explains the development of what Mum-ford sees as our imbalanced, mechanical and dehumanisedtechnologies and social structures.

9

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)

One Dimensional Man

• Marcuse highlights the development of a one-dimensional ra-tionality that is unable to criticise or even understand theworld it is living in.

• He sees such thinking as fundamentally operational, i.e. aimedat control and at achieving practical results, and contraststhis with dialectical thinking, that understands reality as aplay of opposites and as an ongoing process of evolutionwhere each manifestation attracts its own negation.

• Hence we use one-dimensional, formal methods to try andsolve practical problems, without having a perspective ofwhat is negated or left out. This means we remain unable toenvisage the possibility of another more fulfilling way of life.

10

The Underlying Foundation

• Each author is pointing to the same underlying foundation inthe development of technology: i.e. a certain “turn of mind”taken in Western civilisation that has reached its purest ex-pression in the development of science and mathematics.

• We traced this turn of mind in the increasingly abstract na-ture of modern mathematical and logical thinking, culminat-ing in Turing’s idea of a universal Turing machine and thedevelopment of the general purpose computer.

• Now we are saying that it is this objective, rational, materiallyorientated mode of thinking that lies behind the developmentof all modern technology.

11

The Era of the Technique

• We no longer consult the priest or the astrologer when itcomes to making the fundamental decisions that affect thedevelopment of our society.

• We consult the experts, the people who have studied therelevant areas and who understand the necessary techniquesto bring about our desired ends.

• We might pray that our business venture will succeed, butwe will not expect our prayers to work without studying themarket, engaging in advertising, and setting our prices tomaximise expected profit.

• At every level, from the development of new technology tothe governing of a nation, we seek the best technique toachieve success. The ideal of serving God or the divine Kinghas been replaced by the ideal of serving material progress.

12

But What is a Technique?

• We expect a technique to literally be an effective method,

i.e. that it will do what it says.

• If a technique fails, we will go back and find out why. We

will fix it until it works.

• In the process, we will search for exactly those material con-

ditions that will, by a process of cause and effect, bring about

the final goal.

• If we can exactly specify the conditions and actions necessary,

then we will have constructed an effective method that works

in the world, not just as a Turing machine.

13

Techniques and Formality

• A technique can describe a range of quite loose and informalprocesses and activities whereas an effective method mustbe precisely defined using a formal language.

• But this does not mean that informal techniques cannot inprinciple be described as effective methods. It’s just that inmost situations such a description would be impractical andunnecessary.

• The issue is not the formal expression of a technique, butwhether we can express it informally to a sufficient degree ofaccuracy that it will achieve its aim.

• Even when a technique does not achieve its aim, this doesnot mean we were not using an effective method, it justmeans we were using the wrong effective method for thatparticular task.

14

Technology and the Effective Method

• Effective methods can be embodied as machines, such as a

steam engine embodying an effective method for transform-

ing the heat energy of burning coal into the kinetic energy

of a moving wheel.

• Equally, an effective method can be a technique for organ-

ising human labour in a factory, or for performing mental

arithmetic.

• Or we can build machines, i.e. computers, that can execute

any effective method we care to devise.

• In each case we can see that technology is the material

embodiment of effective methods.

15

But What is Technology?

• Technology is more than just manufactured products and

manufacturing processes: it encompasses all the effective

methods we use to order our society, including education,

government, entertainment, insurance, banking, real estate,

etc.

• Technology comprises the systems we use to control and

direct our lives. These systems encompass not only techno-

logical objects, but also the processes and structures that lie

behind their production, distribution and use.

• As Heidegger saw, we do not just use our techniques to com-

mand nature, we have turned their organising and controlling

features on ourselves as well.

16

The Connection between Science and Technology

• To devise an effective method, we must first have abstracteda model or theory of the situation we wish to control.

• The disciplined building of such models is one of the ba-sic tasks of modern science: in Heideggerian terms, science“challenges” nature to provide answers via carefully con-trolled experiments.

• As scientific theories grow in explanatory power they providemore reliable predictions about how a system will evolve.

• With prediction comes the ability to control via the rationaldesign and application of technology.

• For example, once we have a basic scientific, mathemati-cal model of the behaviour of electricity, then we can designtechnology to control the flow of electricity and produce elec-tronic artifacts.

17

Science is not Neutral

The predictive power of science

directly leads to the development

of new technologies. Science is

conducted, financed and applied

within a technological system that

relies on the findings of science in

order to evolve.

c a t e g oris a tio n

a bstr a c tio n into c o n c e p ts

p re d i c tio nS C IEN C E

m o d e l a n d th e ory b u ild in g

TE C HN O L O G Y

f orm u l a tio n o f e ff e c tiv e m e th o ds

d esig n o f p hysi c a l m e a ns

c o ntro l o f p hysi c a l e n ds

PER C EPTI O N A C TI O N

Th e W orld o f Exp e ri e n c e

The aim of technology is to progress. As technology has becomemore sophisticated it has also required the support of more so-phisticated and formal scientific research. Ironically, the progressof science is now equally dependent on the progress of technol-ogy.

18

Part Two: Information Technology andControl

19

Writing: The First Information Technology

• Writing embodies an effective method for representing lan-

guage in a durable physical form.

• This durability allows us to “freeze” human speech and reli-

ably transmit its meaning through space and time to a distant

recipient.

• However sophisticated our modern communication systems,

we still transmit the same underlying commodity (informa-

tion) with the same purpose in mind (to inform) using the

same technique: i.e. we symbolically encode information into

a form suitable for transmission which is then decoded by a

recipient in order to retrieve the meaning.

20

A Human-Inclusive Model of Communication

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21

Networks and Hierarchies

• The preceding communication model considers a single source

communicating individual messages to a single destination.

• While all communication exchanges can be broken down to

this level, communication generally occurs within the larger

context of human social organisations.

• The two structures that capture the basic forms of these

organisational communication structures are the network and

the hierarchy.

22

Social Networks

• By default, a human being in a social environment is already

a member of a communications network.

• This network describes all the possible avenues of communi-

cation open to the individuals in that community.

• If we try and map our personal communications network, we

are faced with a global communications infrastructure whose

full extent remains a matter of guesswork.

• All we can say is that we are connected, almost instanta-

neously, to anyone who has access to a phone line or a wire-

less network.

23

Characteristics of a Communications Network

• A network is only partially determined by the possible physicallines of communication and is finally determined by the flowsof information that actually occur.

• Flows of network information are unregulated and depend onthe individual behaviours of the senders and receivers. Hence,control is decentralised.

• Due to the unregulated and decentralised nature of a net-work, members must negotiate the terms of any transactionsthat occur.

• Each network member has some degree of freedom aboutthe transactions they negotiate.

• The overall behaviour of a network is emergent, i.e. it is theaggregate of the individual behaviours of each member. Thismeans a network can respond flexibly to changing situations.

24

Hierarchies

• Once a central authority emerges we have a more hierarchically-based social organisation.

• We can either see the hierarchy as a fundamental structureof the universe or as a fundamental way that we understandthe structure of the universe.

• For example, we naturally break up sense experience in termsof wholes, composed of parts, such as seeing our body as asingle whole which can be decomposed into a torso with legsand arms and a head.

• In abstract terms, a hierarchy is what results from a processof collecting smaller elements into greater wholes.

• In a hierarchical organisation, instead of collecting the detailsof experience together to form a unifying concept, we collectpeople together to form groups, or groups of groups.

25

Democratic Hierarchies

• Given a group, we can nominate a person to represent that

group and we can then collect together group leaders to form

another group that subsumes all the smaller groups.

• Leaders of such groups of groups can act on behalf of all the

individuals beneath them in the hierarchy.

• This can simplify the conflicting wishes of the people so that

a leader can take coherent action.

• In this way a hierarchy can act as an information processor,

transforming information relayed by the people in the form

of votes, opinion polls, pressure groups, etc., into policies,

laws and actions. Here the authority flows from the bottom

up, and the people remain ultimately in charge (in theory).

26

Bureaucratic Hierarchies

• However, for a hierarchy to implement a complex action, we

require an organisation where the authority flows from the

top down, i.e. a bureaucracy.

• The effectiveness of such an organisation is based on its

ability to abstract information from the world, represent this

information in a model, and then use the model to control

its environment.

• From this we can see that a hierarchical organisation is itself

a technology aimed at using effective methods to control the

essential features of the environment in which it operates.

27

The Characteristics of a Bureaucratic Hierarchy

• Information flows vertically between levels in the hierarchy

within a fixed tree-like hierarchical structure.

• Each hierarchical level consists of a collection of individuals

or nodes that have the same or similar levels of authority to

perform certain actions.

• Each node in a particular level has the power to issue in-

structions to control the actions of a set of nodes in the

level immediately below.

• Each node in the hierarchy receives information from multiple

lower sources which it must simplify and make relevant before

passing it up to the next level.

28

The Characteristics of a Bureaucratic Hierarchy

• Control in a hierarchy is centralised: information passes down

the structure in the form of instructions that must either be

obeyed or must cause another flow of information up the

hierarchy explaining why the instruction has failed.

• Information passing up the hierarchy becomes more and more

abstract and general and information passing down the hier-

archy becomes more and more concrete and particular.

• Each node inside the hierarchy is itself at the top of a sub-

hierarchy within the overall hierarchy. This enables the sub-

hierarchies to perform specialised functions while remaining

an integrated part of the overall authority structure.

29

The Characteristics of a Bureaucratic Hierarchy

• Information passing up the hierarchy is in two forms: a)information about the environment as it exists independentlyof any action originating in the hierarchy; b) feedback aboutthe effects of actions initiated by the hierarchy.

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s a l es m a nuf a c turin g d istrib utio n

30

Hierarchies and Information Technology

• Large, complex hierarchies lose the flexibility necessary torespond quickly to the unexpected.

• The lower levels of such hierarchies lack the authority tomake instant decisions to resolve unusual situations.

• Instead, inappropriate rules can be applied or time is ex-pended sending queries up a chain of command.

• This lack of flexibility places a significant brake on the growthof the hierarchical organisation. For a hierarchy can onlycontrol that with which it can easily share information.

• Hence the fundamental link between the growth of the hi-erarchical organisation and the development of informationtechnologies, because IT can increase the volume, speedand flexibility of hierarchical communication.

31

Information Technology and Control

• Peter McMahon defines IT as “all those technologies utilizedto create, store, process or communicate information” andargues that “most essentially, IT can be understood as thetechnology designed to facilitate control of social activity inthe broadest sense” (Global Control, 2002, p. 1).

• This seems to contradict our everyday experience of IT open-ing doors to new information sources, making our lives easierand more convenient.

• However, regardless of the use to which it is put, all technol-ogy exercises a form of control over the domain in which itoperates.

• For instance, a mobile phone embodies an effective methodfor translating sound waves into microwaves by exercisingcontrol over the electrons in its internal circuitry.

32

Social Control

• Social control occurs within the context of human organisa-

tions. It is here that we have to look at the role of IT.

• Nearly all the government and corporate organisations that

control the day-to-day operation of our society are structured

as bureaucratic (non-democratic) hierarchies.

• Once we understand that such hierarchies are themselves an

embodiment of an information technology, we can then see

the pervasive, underlying nature of IT in everyday life.

• Most people in the developed world now act as information

processors within the machinery of the hierarchical organisa-

tions in which they work.

33

The Organisation as an Information System

If we look inside these hierarchies we find that their fundamen-

tal task is the creation, storing, processing and communication

of information - the very tasks that characterise IT. By step-

ping back, we can see that a whole organisation, including all

the pieces of computer hardware and software, the communica-

tions devices, the paper records, the employees in their various

roles and with their various levels of expertise, all act together

as one coordinated, structured information system. And such

information systems usually have definite aims that are achieved

by exercising control over people and resources.

34

The Modern Role of Information Technology

• Information Technology is the means whereby our societycan function in a coordinated manner.

• Civilisation would be impossible without organisation, andorganisation requires communication and control, which re-quires information technology.

• Our use of IT also extends to networks of social interac-tion, entertainment and self-education. But these activitiesare still largely controlled and financed by government andcorporate organisations that are pursuing their own quite dif-ferent aims.

• The primary reason our global IT infrastructure exists is sothat the major organisations that helped finance and supportits development can use it to exercise greater control overtheir domains of interest.

35

Lecture Exercises

• Describe the connection between the idea of an effective

method and physical reality of modern technology.

• Describe how the progress of science and the progress of

technology have become dependent on each other.

• Describe and contrast a networked communication system

with a bureaucratic hierarchy. In what situations would one

system be preferred over the other?

• What is the connection between information technology and

social control?

36