Computers And Society Research Paper

When the social implications of computers are discussed they are most often viewed in utopian vs. dystopian perspectives. For example, many influential protagonists have argued that the Internet and the Web promote global community, electronic democracy and an information economy, bringing fulfillment, empowerment, and jobs for the twenty-first century. Others fear the new networks and services on the Internet and the Web are isolating individuals, undermining democratic processes, and destroying jobs. Still others dismiss the importance of ICTs.

Such views of technology either as an ‘unalloyed blessing,’ an ‘unmitigated curse,’ or ‘not worthy of special notice’ oversimplify its role and fail to provide an understanding of the ‘actual mechanism by which technology leads to social change’ (Mesthene 2000). While a continuing debate between utopian and dystopian perspectives has illuminated the social and economic issues at stake, it has failed to inform policy and practice. It is, therefore, important to develop perspectives on the relationship between computers and society as a means to address broad social, economic, and political issues, and also guide social and technical choices about ICTs in a variety of contexts.

1. The Social And Technical Shaping Of Access

All technologies are inherently social in that they entail physical artifacts or equipment, which are designed, produced, and used by people. Moreover, the design and use of technologies involves know-how, that is, expertise, which is in itself a social attribute (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985, p. 3). Technologies are also social in that they define, but do not determine, how people do things, making some paths more economically, culturally, or socially rational than others. For example, computers and related ICTs define ways in which people can get information and communicate with one another. A student can get the news online via the World Wide Web or through a newspaper. ICTs not only reshape how people do things, they also shape and reshape what, when, and where things are done and what people know, who they know, and what they consume.

1.1 Dimensions Of Tele-Access

ICTs involve much more than just access to information or the technology of the computer, implied by conventional discussion of the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ ICTs shape an individual’s, house-hold’s, firm’s, or nation’s access to information, people, services, and technology. The concept of tele-access highlights how ICTs shape access—both electronically mediated and unmediated—to a wide array of social and economic resources.

Social and technical choices about ICTs can re-configure electronic and physical access to four inter-related resources: information, people, services, and technology (Dutton 1999). The most commonly recognized is access to information. ICTs not only change the way people get information, but also alter the whole corpus of what a person knows and the information available to an individual at any given time and place. ICTs play a role in making some people information rich and others comparatively information poor. But access to information is only one set of relationships shaped by ICTs, and not necessarily the most socially significant.

ICTs also shape access to people. Choices about the design and use of ICTs not only change the ways individuals communicate with one another, but also influence whom individuals meet, talk to, stay in touch with, work with, and get to know. ICTs can connect or isolate people. For example, throughout the 1990s, the most common use of the Internet was for electronic mail (e-mail), that is, for gaining access to people, not for access to information per se.

Third, ICTs shape access to services. ICTs do more than simply change the way people consume information, products, and services. They also influence what products and services a person consumes and whom an individual purchases them from. ICTs can render obsolete a local business or an entire industry, but also create a new business or industry.

Finally, access to particular technologies—equipment, know-how, and techniques—shapes access to other technologies as ICTs interconnect and depend on one another in many ways. For instance, the Internet can provide access to vast numbers of computers around the world, yet a person needs a computer and other ICTs (such as a telephone line, a cable connection, or wireless device) to access the Internet.

There are many other ways in which ICTs can reduce, screen, reinforce, or alter tele-access, such as the content and flow of information, by accident or design. ICTs do not just provide access to more information or more people, many of whom a person would not be in touch with otherwise: they change patterns of interaction between people, information, communities, and/organizations. As a substitute for face-to-face communication, for example, ICTs can provide benefits such as reducing travel, saving time, and extending the geography of human community. They may replace valuable human contact with a much less rewarding form of communication, fostering social isolation, or permit communication among people who might never have an opportunity to meet face to face. Tele-access encompasses all these substitutions, enhancements, and much more, by high-lighting how people make social and technical choices about ICTs in ways that will reshuffle society, influencing who’s in and who’s left out.

1.2 Social Factors Shaping Choices And Their Implications For Access

ICT innovations and their social implications are not random or unstructured. For example, patterns of tele-access, such as the distribution of information haves and have-nots, are enabled and constrained by the social and economic contexts within which relevant actors at all levels make choices. Major sets of factors can be identified that facilitate or constrain the design and use of ICTs in ways that shape tele-access (Dutton 1999).

One set includes a variety of economic resources and constraints, such as the size, wealth, and vitality of nations, companies, and other actors. These place major constraints on the development and use of ICTs in all arenas of activity. A second set consists of ICT paradigms and practices. Ideas can become the foundation of powerful belief systems or ‘paradigms’ which create a way of interpreting reality that is very different to that perceived by people whose thinking is embedded in another paradigm. Concepts such as the ‘information society’ and the emergence of ‘virtual universities,’ for instance, have been important factors in shaping social and political choices in the design and implementation of ICTs, irrespective of their descriptive validity. At the same time, experience and knowledge about ICTs can influence or even create a paradigm shift, which will have important implications for how people design and use ICTs within particular settings.

Another set of factors entails conceptions and responses of users of ICTs. Technologies are designed with a more or less well founded conception of the users—whether workers, consumers, managers, citizens, viewers, or audiences—who play an active role in shaping the implications of ICTs in ways that would not be expected by simply extrapolating from the perceived potential of the technology. Misconceptions of the user can undermine the diffusion of ICTs.

A set of factors related to the geography of space and place can also facilitate or constrain tele-access; for example, a person’s location shapes access to ICTs. The use of computers and telecommunication technologies can depend on where ICTs are placed within a household or around the world. ICTs do not erase geography, as is often argued, but often make geography more important (Goddard and Richardson 1996). For instance, since ICTs can make location less significant for gaining electronic access, they enable individuals or firms to be more strategic in shaping physical access; that is, as ICTs enable more flexibility in location decisions, a firm can place a higher priority on other criteria, such as facilitating face-to-face communication with customers, or gaining access to skilled or low-cost labor, in choosing where to locate particular jobs and functions.

Finally, a wide variety of institutional arrangements and public policies, such as first amendment traditions within the USA, constrain choices about access. Technical, social, policy, and/organizational innovation are interdependent (Freeman 1996). For example, the design of an organization influences the use of ICTs, but ICTs also create a variety of new options for radically redesigning organizations and interactions between organizations.

All these and other social factors shape and are shaped by tele-access in ways that can have both immediate and cumulative long-range consequences on most areas of modern life. However, a focus on the social and technical shaping of access is but one way to understand and study the social implications of ICTs. It is also useful to compare this perspective with a number of more conventional perspectives on the ‘information revolution’ and what it will mean for society, defined by the kinds of problems, assumptions, and frameworks guiding those who work within these traditions.

Much of the work on computers and society can be usefully classified under one of the following broad and overlapping labels, which capture the primary focus of each perspective. These include perspectives focused on impacts, influence, technology, strategy, and information (Dutton 1999). These theoretical foci have influenced policy and practice around the world by telling people what to think about and what to ignore, and can all be contrasted with a perspective focused on the shaping of tele-access.

2. The Social ‘Impacts’ Of ICTs

The classic dystopian novel of the twentieth century, George Orwell’s 1984, pivoted around the emergence of two-way television—the telescreen—as an instrument of propaganda and electronic surveillance. Half a century later, the growing centrality of the Internet has generated updated Orwellian visions of multi-media surveillance.

These scenarios appear highly plausible because they are often based on the actual capabilities of ICTs. However, the actual impacts of ICTs are more difficult to forecast because they are shaped by social and political choices and not simply by features of the technology. The same can be said of more immediate concerns over the implications of ICTs on privacy, freedom of speech, and employment. Some of the earliest research on the social impact of ICTs was led by specialists involved directly in the development of computing and telecommunications who sensed that the public were failing to understand the full potential of the computer and the risks it posed to society. They formed interest groups within their respective professional associations and attempted to explain how the technology works and how it could affect individuals and society in terms of major issues, such as privacy and surveillance, which still remain central to policy debates.

2.1 The Limits Of Technological Determinism

The social impact approach usually was based on rational forecasts of the social opportunities and risks created by particular features of the technology. For instance, the enormous storage capacity of the com-puter raised the potential for organizations to create huge databanks of information about individuals. However, empirical research usually found that rational expectations based on such capabilities of the technology were seldom realized (Kling 2000). For example, early study of the impact of computers on privacy found that computerized organizations did not change their record-keeping practices in the ways anticipated by those who were alarmed about data-banks. Computers did indeed enable organizations to create huge databanks, but managers and professionals used the computer within prevailing data processing paradigms, leading them to employ this equipment to simply increase the efficiency of their existing practices. It has taken decades for new ICT paradigms to emerge, which would fundamentally alter the ways in which organizations obtain and keep records in ways that changed the kinds of information they collect and created major new threats to privacy and surveillance.

Likewise, forecasts of the paperless office were based on technical capabilities and a rational expectation that people would want to save the time and costs associated with paper. However, these forecasts ignored the habits and values of readers and writers and the countervailing technical advantages of paper, such as the relative difficulty of reading an electronic screen. No one knows how long a transition from paper to electronic screen may take, but it will not be determined simply by advances in the technical features, such as screen resolution. It is clear that individuals and/organizations have become dependent increasingly on electronic media, such as by replacing mail with e-mail. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, the production of paper has continued to grow with advances in ICTs, and is often supported by these advances, such as with online book stores spurring book sales.

This poor track record in forecasting the implications of technical change has led to fundamental criticisms of theories based on deterministic assumptions that particular real or potential technical features will have predictable ‘impacts.’ The public is often told that technology is on a predetermined trajectory, but different scientists forecast different trajectories. By contrast, much social research and analysis on the design and impacts of technologies has emphasized the decisive role played by social choices in determining ultimate paths of technological development as well as their social implications (Kling 2000).

Studies of the social bases of choices shaping technological design have, therefore, led social scientists to no longer look only at the social implications of technological change, but also consider the psycho-logical, social, political, geographical, and economic factors that influence the design, production, and use of technology. This research on the ‘social shaping’ of technological change has been highly critical of the simplified, linear models of cause and effect used by technological determinists. This has led to a greater emphasis on exploring the underlying ‘processes’ of technical and social change, such as captured by the shaping of tele-access, rather than predicting their long-term impacts.

2.2 Technology Matters In Shaping Access

The study of technological change suggests, therefore, that tele-access—which is entailed in the key social impacts attributed to ICTs—should be viewed as the outcome of an indeterminate social and political process rather than being set on a predetermined technological trajectory. For example, the much promoted views that technological advances are democratizing access to ICTs or isolating individuals are based on deterministic assumptions that are empirically questionable. They are also dangerous because deterministic perspectives on the future can undermine the political will to make hard choices to ensure positive social and political outcomes.

The design and development of ICTs is not as deterministic of social outcomes as is often assumed by early theorists. Neither are they neutral. Advances in ICTs reshape access, but they do not determine access. Technology is like policy, because it tells us how we are supposed to do things, and makes some ways of doing things more rational and practical than another. Also, the biases designed into technological artifacts and systems can be even more enduring than legislation (Winner 1986, pp. 19–39), and create a momentum that is difficult to reverse (Hughes 1994). For instance, the rise of e-mail is biased toward the speed up of interpersonal communication. Individuals can choose to slow their communication down, but this often takes a conscious effort and strong political will within organizations and networks accustomed to Internet speed.

3. The Study Of Influence

Another early perspective on computers and society, closely related to the study of impacts, evolved out of research on propaganda and the political implications of the mass media of newspapers, radio, television, and film in the aftermath of World War II. This media research tradition created a number of useful models of media effects, including notions of the two-step flow and agenda-setting, which highlights the critical role of the media as a ‘gatekeeper,’ such as in shaping access to the news.

This media studies ‘influence’ tradition has extended into work on computers and society. The tradition focuses on the content of messages conveyed through the media and the messages’ influence on those exposed directly or indirectly to them, such as in studies of the violent content of video games targeted at children. Those looking at ICTs within this influence tradition often ask whether the interactive character of emerging media, such as envisioned for digital and Web-TV, will make them more engaging and, there-fore, more powerful in shaping attitudes, beliefs, and values. Others have focused on the way the profusion of media and channels can segment audiences in ways that might erode the quality and integrative effect of the mass media, and no longer provide the common experiences or shared text of a community.

Concern over audience segmentation provides an example of how technological change has challenged research in the influence tradition, which is built on a presumption of access to a mass audience. McLuhan anticipated this problem in the early 1960s when he argued that there had been too much emphasis on the content of the message rather than the more significant effect of the medium itself. In claiming ‘it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’, McLuhan (1964, p. 9) indicated his belief that television’s ability to recon-figure access to messages was more significant than whatever message was conveyed.

In this respect, McLuhan’s perspective resonates more with a focus on tele-access than with those working within the influence tradition that shaped communication research over the decades. But technological change has challenged assumptions of communication research, which tended to take access to a mass audience for granted. Gaining access to audiences has become a central preoccupation of the communication industries, from popular music to broadcasting, cable and telephone industries, and a focus for research on the social implications of ICTs, including the media. The very idea of ‘mass media’ has been challenged as communication researchers saw technical change reconfiguring access to audiences. The influence perspective becomes even less applicable as one moves outside media studies, such as to assess the implications of ICTs for the economy.

4. Studies Of Technology And Society

Outside the communications field, social scientists generally have looked at the computer and ICTs more generally as just special cases in a more general concern with the study of technology and society. Treatments of technology and society have flourished since the 1960s.

4.1 The Role Of Technology In Society

Philosophers and social scientists have focused on how society is affected by the growing centrality of technology—and how technology, as a means, has become an end in itself. Researchers in this field have also analyzed the impacts of specific ICTs, ranging from the videophone to the Internet. Such technology assessments bring to the surface a wide range of multidisciplinary issues that go far beyond concerns with the mass media; they show, for example, how ICTs have become an integral component of a ‘high-tech society’ that pervades all aspects of our lives.

Another major contribution to this literature has focused on control as one impact of technological change. Many dystopian novels and films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jurassic Park, capture the fear that technology is out of control and has created a new, unelected, high-tech elite which increasingly dominates decision making.

4.2 Technology, Expertise, And Social Control

Early discussion of computers and telecommunications reflected this concern that modern technology is becoming an unstoppable force which would support increasingly centralized control in organizations and society. Many observers of the social impacts of more recent advances in ICTs argue the opposite—that the convergence of computing and networking has de-centralized control over the technology and placed more control in the hands of users (de Sola Pool 1983). Nevertheless, many others continue to argue that ICT innovations are empowering a new elite of experts, who have the skills and knowledge to control networks in organizations and society.

Technology concerns more than just equipment. It also encompasses the knowledge that is essential to its use (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985, p. 3). The control of technology is, therefore, bound up with issues of who has access to the skills, equipment, and know-how essential to design, implement, and employ technology. Changes in technology can, therefore, restrict access to all these resources. For instance, early mainframe computers depended on programmers with knowledge of specialized programming languages. But technological change can equally expand access, for example, by the way simple graphical user interfaces with the Web have made access to information stored on millions of computers available to users round the world at the click of a mouse button. Likewise, social choices, such as the decision to learn a new human or computer language, affect access to technology, jobs, and people. The ways in which technical and social choices shape access to ICTs has been central to the technological perspective, but was often lost in a body of work covering myriad concerns at all levels of analysis and across all technology.

5. ICT Strategies

A focus on the goals and strategies of actors, instead of the capabilities of the technology, has been most fully developed within the management field, where some of the earliest empirical studies into the design and use of ICTs were conducted. Management researchers began to study computers in the 1950s. From early on, leading management science thinkers highlighted the significance of the convergence into ‘Information Technology’ (IT) of computing, telecommunications, and related management science techniques, such as modeling and computer simulation, but focused on how managers could employ IT (what later came to be called ICTs) to accomplish their objectives.

5.1 Management Use Of ICTs

Through the early decades of its use, the computer was seen by management theorists as a strategic tool for enabling executives to boost centralized control by giving them access to information about the organization’s resources and everyday operations. Centralization was not expected as an inevitable consequence of computerization, but as an extension of and means for realizing the prevailing management paradigm of the time. It was a technical fix for problems that seemed immune to structural reforms, such as efforts to centralize functions or redraw organizational charts (Danziger et al. 1982).

From this strategic perspective, the major implications of ICTs extend from the strategies of management rather than the characteristics of the technology. This view remains central to contemporary management research, but with an ICT management paradigm that places less emphasis on the value of top management control and more on the virtues of innovation and networking (Castells 2000).

Instead of finding that computers inevitably in-creased centralization, early empirical research on computers discovered that those who control decision- making tend to adopt and use ICTs in ways that follow and reinforce existing patterns of control within the organization, whether they be highly centralized or decentralized (Danziger et al. 1982). This research highlighted the malleability of ICTs and the degree to which top managers are only one set of actors within a more complex and interdependent set of actors making decisions about the design and use of IT in organizations. The organizational and social implications of ICTs are the uncertain outcome of a struggle among actors over the design and use of these technologies. It is not taking place on a level playing field, since there are inequalities in existing institutions, cultures, and social and technical systems that favor some actors and choices over others, but neither does any single actor have a monopoly of control.

5.2 The Interaction Of Strategies Within A Broader Ecology Of Games

This struggle for control over ICT design and use generally takes place on a variety of different fields at the same time. All actors are not involved in the same struggle. Instead, individuals and groups are pursuing different goals within their own domains in an ecology of games (Dutton 1999, pp. 14–16). For instance, a technical expert might be pursuing a technically elegant solution to a network’s design, while a top manager is primarily seeking cost reductions. This places major constraints on the predictability of outcomes based on an assessment of strategic goals, unless the varied goals of different actors involved in the broader ecology of games is well understood and/orchestrated.

Global advances in ICTs, the momentum of technologies already in place, and the widespread application of ICTs throughout society place limits on the ability of any individual, household, organization, or nation to control the design and implementation of ICTs in predetermined ways. It is more realistic, for example, to view tele-access, and its consequences, as the outcome of a process of social and technical choices by many different actors within a variety of separate but inter-related technical, organizational, social, and policy arenas. It is the outcome of an ecology of games.

6. The Information Society

A very different and enduring perspective was introduced in the 1970s by discussion of the information society as a new stage in economic development. The information society theorists cite many of the social threats identified by others, such as to personal privacy and information inequality, but they focused more attention on the role of technology, and ICTs in particular, in the economy and society.

6.1 The Information Age Thesis And Its Critics

The American sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a seminal work on the information society, which he first called the ‘post-industrial society’ (Bell 1999). He said information would be the key economic resource in this new era—not raw materials, or financial capital as in earlier agricultural and industrial societies. Citing the US economy as an exemplary case, Bell identified major trends in the development of an information society.

The most significant trend towards an information society was the shift in the majority of the labor force from agriculture (the primary sector) and manufacturing (the secondary sector) to services (the tertiary sector), largely through the growth of ‘information work,’ defined to include a broad array of jobs related to the creation, transmission, and processing of in-formation, ranging from programmers and software engineers, to teachers and researchers. Another trend has been the increasing importance of knowledge and its codification to the management of social and economic institutions. A third set of information society trends involved power shifts, particularly the growing prominence of a knowledge elite, which forms a professional and managerial class who understand and know how to work with data, knowledge, in-formation systems, simulation, and related analytical techniques.

Changes in work, technology, and power posited by this thesis have all been challenged (Freeman 1996). Yet conceptions of the information society have increasingly defined the public’s understanding of social and economic change tied to the computer and related ICTs. Public and corporate policies and academic institutions and journals have been built on the concept of information as a new strategic resource. However, this focus can mislead policy and practice, particularly by the way it has substantially shifted attention to the information sector and away from other parts of the economy.

More generally, the identification of information as the key central resource of the economy has also been widely questioned (Dutton 1999). For example, in-formation has a highly variable currency: it is not always wanted or valued. As a resource, information can lose its value, such as in the case of a day-old newspaper, or retain its value after repeated use, as with a literary classic. If defined narrowly in the sense of being about ‘facts,’ the term ‘information’ becomes far too limiting as a depiction of the social role of ICTs. But if defined very broadly, for instance, as anything that ‘reduces uncertainty,’ then information seems to be so all encompassing that it becomes virtually meaningless.

Moreover, information can create, rather than reduce uncertainty. For example, those more informed about a topic are often less certain about its properties than many who are less informed. There is no linear relationship between information and certainty, but rather what MacKenzie (1999) has called a ‘certainty trough.’ And information is not a new resource. It has been important in every sector of the economy throughout history. Popular conceptions of the ‘in-formation society’—like the virtual society, or the cyberculture—capture the social significance of the ICT revolution. While these concepts emphasize the increasing centrality of ICTs to society, they fail to provide insights about the role of computers and related ICTs in social change. Moreover, if taken literally, many prevailing conceptions of the information society are misleading. They suggest that information is a new economic and social resource, when there is nothing new about the importance of information (Castells 2000). What is new is how you get access to information, but also to people, to services, and to technology itself (Dutton 1999).

6.2 The Politics Of Information: Communicative Power

As people understand the limitations of seeing information as the pivotal concept in the study of ICTs, the central role of processes that shape tele-access has become more evident. The cliche that ‘information is power’ is seldom examined critically. It suggests that experts will gain power over politicians, managers, and the lay public. Yet this thesis ignores the degree to which economic resources enables access to know-ledge—information, expertise, and the means for creating knowledge. It is not information per se, but the ability to control access to information that seems key. Social factors, such as institutional arrangements and public policy, or geographical proximity, as in gaining tacit knowledge from direct observation, can shape access, as well as technologies.

The role of ICTs in shaping access to information might be called ‘information politics’ (Danziger et al. 1982, pp. 133–5). This is also the concern of Garnham (1999), who has argued for a research agenda focused on study of the social processes involving producers, distributors, and users in negotiations over how information is created, disseminated, and consumed. However, as explained above, information is only one element in what can be viewed as a far more general politics of access. ICTs also shape access to people, services, and other ICTs. So it is critical to define information politics broadly to include the choices shaping tele-access and the factors that constrain and facilitate them.

6.3 Perspectives On The Information Age

The idea of an information society entails a staged progression of an economy from an agricultural, to an industrial, to an information society (or ‘information age’) and to whatever comes next, such as a ‘knowledge society.’ An alternative forecast of social and economic evolution is posed by the notion of long economic development cycles caused by successive waves of technological revolutions (Freeman 1996). This approach argues that the invention of a new technology, like the steam engine or the computer, can have applications across the economy that affect many facets of our lives, for instance ICTs having effects well beyond what might be labeled as information work or information processing.

The concepts of staged and cyclical theories of economic and technological change are both attractive because they promise some level of predictability. However, there is no consensus on the identification and validation of these stages or cycles of economic development. Also, there is a long lag of from one to two decades between the invention of a radically new technology and its impact on the way things are done. It takes time for people to change their habits and beliefs and to accept a new paradigm for how they do things. This led to a new focus of attention on the role of ICT paradigms in shaping the impacts of technology in organizations and society (Freeman 1996).

Ideas like the information society, economic cycles and tele-access are important in part because they shape views about the way the world works and, thereby, influence the decisions of individuals, firms, and governments. That is one reason why alternative perspectives on the role of computers in society, such as the shaping of tele-access, are more than competing theories. They are also ideas that can shape decisions in everyday life as well as in once-in-a-lifetime choices.

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