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The papers in this special issue are all versions of presentations given at the conference on Technology and the Rest of Culture held at the New School in January of 1997. The conference was the fifth in a continuing series of Social Research conferences that began in 1989, all of the proceedings of which have appeared as special issues of this journal.
This series has several defining characteristics. First, it recognizes that even the most urgent contemporary events and issues are rarely unprecedented in human history, and second, that earlier experiences and ideas, despite their obvious capacity to illuminate the present, are frequently forgotten in the heat of public controversy. At the same time, this series recognizes that there is an unfortunate tendency to address difficult and complicated matters with narrow expertise, even when meaningful insights and possible answers may be found by bringing to bear a wider range of perspective and ideas.
We therefore have conceived our mission as one of fostering an ongoing public forum in which matters of grave interest and concern can be explored not only in terms of their immediate import, but also within their broad and rich historical and cultural context. More than reaffirming the maxim that to forget his- is to risk repeating it, we seek through this effort to assure a more intellectually inclusive, reflective, and calmer understanding of the "hot" issues of the day.
To realize this mission, these conferences upon which these special issues are based bring together scholars and practitioners from a broad array of fields and disciplines, guaranteeing that topics will not be examined through a single lens, but rather from a virtual kaleidoscope of perspectives ranging from the historic, political, social, economic, and scientific to the philosophical, legal, and aesthetic. This intellectual breadth is reinforced through our collaborations with other cultural institutions that bring their own special expertise and resources to bear on our search for understanding. Thus none of our conferences have been stand-alone events. Instead, each has benefited from a collaboration between the New School, which is the venue of the actual conference, and major cultural institutions, which sponsor their own related exhibitions, lectures, readings, and other events, primarily in their own facilities.
We take pride in setting a new standard for such inter-institutional collaborations. For example, the first conference "In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Diseases," examined the AIDS epidemic in light of the past, and was accompanied by an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. The next, "Home: A Place in the World," which explored the meanings of home and belonging in the context of present-day homelessness and the loss of homeland was a collaboration with five major New York City museums. The third in the series, "Rescue: The Paradoxes of Virtue," celebrated the founding of the University in Exile at the New School and the fourth, "In the Company of Animals," explored the present controversy over our proper relationship to other animals in partnership with four museums and the Academy of American Poets. Finally with "Technology and the Rest of Culture" we enjoyed the collaboration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Environmental Simulation Laboratory and the Media Studies Program of the New School.
Since at least the 1970's there has been widespread discussion about the emerging information society. Our adoption of new forms of electronic interconnectedness is quickly creating a complex and changed environment in which we are bound to lead our lives. Not only is there radio and television, which now almost seem part of our birthright, if not part of nature, but we routinely shop, bank, receive our salaries, and pay our bills electronically. Our libraries are becoming virtual and museum artifacts are increasingly digitalized and available in cyberspace. E-mail and faxes link us almost instantaneously to distant comers of the world. There is more information available at the click of a mouse than we know what to do with, and this information is at once centralized and decentralized. Atomization and isolation progress in parallel with globalization and the homogenization of cultures. Traditional cultures are appropriated, reshaped, and disseminated while imagined cultures emerge in new forms. Virtual reality approaches the authority and authenticity of historical reality.
With all this come increasingly significant, but frequently unnoticed changes in how we define ourselves. As in the past, the consequences our technological choices are immense. As in the past the newest and dominant technologies have become our metaphors for society and identity. Our concepts of mind are a prime example. Where once we described thinking as wheels turning in our heads, we now speak of the mind as a computer and when things go awry we no longer speak of having a screw loose but of having malfunctioning circuits. We even worry about whether computers can be said to be conscious. And these are by no means superficial changes. Rather as Langdon Winner, one of the participants in this issue has written, "In choosing our terms, we express a vision of the world and name our deepest commitments." Now it is not as if these extraordinary technological changes have gone unnoticed. On the contrary, news about them and their potential consequences are to be found everywhere. However, and this is the point, much of the discourse about our new "information" environment has been fraught by polar fantasies about the presumed opportunities and dangers they portend. Its advocates predict utopia and a technological sublime, while its critics warn of loss, inequity, and collapse. Where its advocates see a resurgence of participatory democracy, its detractors see increased vulnerability to manipulation by those who control access. And perhaps most troubling of all is that we proceed as if these changes are inevitable. Leo Marx, another speaker at the conference has written that, "By now most people in modernized societies have become habituated to the seeming power of advancing technology and its products to change the way we live. Indeed the steady growth of that power is just another self-evident feature of modem life that calls for no more comment than the human penchant for breathing." More than anything it is this assumption of inevitability and its associated lack of consciousness about the values, ideas, and meanings inherent in these changes that motivated this conference.
It's title, which is not, as you have undoubtedly noted, Technology and Culture but rather the more awkward "Technology and the Rest of Culture" is also at the heart of the matter. It is meant to call attention to the idea that technology is not a thing, as Professor Marx and others make clear. It is not something separate and apart from the rest of our culture with a life of its own. And as long as we fail to acknowledge this we will continue to endow it with agency and autonomy, which in turn will have profound, often unintended, moral, and political consequences.
The "Technology and the Rest of Culture" conference was made possible by the very generous support of The Gilman Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Engineering Foundation and Interval Research Corp. We are extremely grateful to each of these institutions. Arien Mack
Part 1. The Concept of Technology: History, Definitions, and Critiques
Part 2. Keynote Address
Part 3. Case Studies
Part 4. Science
Part 5. Political Life
Part 6. Imagination
Part 7. Contemporary Moral and Political Issues: A Discussion
Perhaps nothing is so deeply educational- I mean more effective in revealing previously unnoticed aspects of our existence- than the discovery that the words we use often becloud the very things we are talking about. If I were to seek a common property of the three papers that follow, it would be precisely their educational brilliance in this regard. Robert McC. Adams, Leo Marx, and Langdon Winner make us realize that all too often technology- the term that seems so clarificatory when we employ it to explain various problems and properties of modem society-can be just such a beclouding term. Like all educational advances, this is both discomfiting and reassuring. Whatever else the readers of these papers will learn, I am certain they will never again use the term technology as a cure-all, a vade medcum, an open sesame.
More specifically, Robert McC. Adams alerts us to the manner in which technology, so frequently invoked as a great Archimedean lever, is in fact inextricably enmeshed in the very institutions and lifeways of the society to which its leverage is presumably being applied. When we have finished his paper, we will think twice before declaring that technology is the "cause" of, say, unemployment or alienation or whatever. "What we need to recognize," he tells us, "is that technology is intimately embedded in the entire field of forces constituting society at large." If it is the mover, it is also the moved.
From a differently oriented, more historically rooted approach, Leo Marx disabuses us of the "comforting theme" that technology refers to a linear advance by which "homo sapiens [has] acquired its unique power over nature." Tracing the changing popular conceptions of the term, Marx warns us that, although we can speak with some confidence and clarity about the nature of particular technologies, since we cannot identify the defining properties of technology, the singular noun, the "concept of technology becomes hazardous to the moral and political cogency of our thought." In a word, we cannot attribute to disembodied things-"machines"-the complex social rearrangements in which they play at best only a strategic, not an all-embracing role.
Last, but certainly not least, Langdon Winner forces us to recognize the hidden rationales that strongly affect utopian and dystopian visions of the future. In his examination of what is often passed off as the technologically determined shape of things to come, we discover how sociological and economic considerations enter into the conception of technology itself.
The three papers differ, and so some extent disagree, in what they see as the implications of the contemporary embodiment of technology in processes that generate information to a much greater degree than physical product, that tend to transform tasks once recognized as "skilled" or "demanding" into mere routines, and that seem to threaten our own self-understanding, self-esteem, and social involvement. I think it fair to characterize Adams as cautiously hopeful-technology is overwhelmingly "a reservoir of underutilized promises rather than threats"; Winner as perceiving it largely as the basis for misleading social expectations and explanations; and Marx as agnostic with respect to outcomes, cautionary with regard to expectations.
Hence no single view emerges from these papers, whether diagnostic or prognostic. I find that to be welcomed. The tensions, sometimes disagreements, that develop among those best equipped to penetrate to the core of concepts are not the least educational aspect of this delicate task. The papers that follow are elegant examples of just such tensions, although I would not say disagreements. One reads them, not alone with a sense of new understanding, but with an awareness of new indeterminacies. Technology is far more deep-rooted, many-sided, and far-reaching than we ordinarily think it to be. This is the all-important educational contribution that these essays convey.
How do the machine technologies that define modernity actually go about changing human existence? This phase of the investigation into "technology and the rest of culture" focuses on how particular technologies of communication, understood in the broadest sense as the conveyance of data from one point to another, impinge upon and alter fundamental patterns of individual and social life. In each case-printing, telegraphy and telephony, and computation (which can be taken as a form of communication within the domain of the self) - the creation of new instruments and new devices has resulted in new artifacts of cultural behavior: the reading of books, the sending of messages across vast spaces, the bringing together and sorting through of vast amounts of data in digital form.
The perspective on such changes taken by the following three case studies is that of the historian, precisely the historian as opposed to the literary critic or the political theorist or the philosopher of mind. The shared perspective here is one of inquiry into causes as much as effects, and into effects not as isolated consequences of specific machines or mechanical processes, but effects as dispersed variations in experience that can be understood as constituting the cultural meaning of these specific technologies.
What is a book? What is a telegraphic (or electronic) message? What is a telephonic conversation? What is a digital calculation? Historians seek answers to these simple-seeming but defiantly difficult questions less in the object or act itself than in the vibrating web of implication, the nuanced texture of the experience represented by these terms. Meaning lies in experience, the American Pragmatists teach, and it is to the records and accounts of experience that the historian goes. Each of these terms (book, and so on), which refer to products of technologies of mechanical (or electronic) reproduction, names a profound alteration in how people understand the nexus of relations within which they have their individual and social being: the relation between their minds and their bodies, between their minds or mind-body entities and those of others, between inside and outside, between the visible and invisible, between near and far, between space and time. Such effects of altered ways of communication within and without are incalculable. The changes occur within a continuum: from speech to writing to print to telegraphy to the computer screen. Each node represents a jolt of some degree of disturbance, perhaps a deeper disruption of the previous understanding of what it means to communicate than the collective mind realizes at the time. The historian's materials include unplanned, deflected, and unconscious effects-include, that is, the past's sense of its future as much as its beliefs about its present.
Of course historians are also interested in technology as "force," as transformative energy, as power acting within society. We want to know, and need to know, objective facts, the sort which can be measured, put into quantities of height and depth and horsepower, in units of velocity. But the less conspicuous issues that belong to the subjective realm are those that call most needfully for the historian's perspective. What does all this power, and the particular forms it takes in the all-dominating category of communication," make of the human beings it serves? What do our machines call forth from us in the way of human possibility? Writing in 1918 about questions and conundrums much like those embedded in the topic of "technology and the rest of culture," historian Henry Adams wrote that the new American-the child of incalculable coal power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as new forces yet undetermined-must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society (Adams, 1946 [1918], p. 496).
Historians serve the common good by placing such perceptions as Adams attributes to "the new American" within the horizon of history, explaining the accretion of power engendered by new technologies as the result of deliberate human decisions and describable social processes. How did new technologies get organized and distributed to people in just this form and not another? Historians understand changes in the present by reference to changes in the past, helping us see that our "past" is precisely that which explains our "present," and that what we may see only as "technology" or "the machine," is also a reflection of social power-relations, of decisions made for the benefit of some against those of others. The marketing of high technology as consumable goods seems a fulfillment of Adams's prophecy regarding the American of the year 2000. Yet that same newly empowered figure is also likely to experience an increasing loss of power when it comes to influencing the shape of public life. Adams focused on the contradiction between the power to do and the power to know. For us, a gulf seems to yawn between what we accomplish in front of our computer screens, and what we imagine we can accomplish as citizens. Has the same technology that empowers our imaginations, for example, to inhabit realms of "virtual reality," also disempowered our political will, our capacity to act collectively in the actual public realm? By viewing technology as variegated modes of collective and private experience, historians pose such questions as how it came about and what it has meant that people have learned to use books and telephones and computers, and what such accessions of communicative power might yet teach us about empowerment in the rest of culture.
References Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (New York: Modern Library, 1946 [1918]).
My grandfather used to vex me by praising my brother for "thinking with his hands." Even as a small boy I knew that the default assumption was that a person thinks with his head and that the rest of his body could be considered relatively dumb. When Rodin's Thinker, for example, rested his bronze head on his bronze hand, it was obvious in which of these two bronze masses the bronze thinking was meant to be going on. Yet here was my grandfather complimenting my brother for doing his thinking the wrong way round.
The three papers in this section address the relationship between technology and a special kind of thinking: science. If theory can be considered head and technology hands, then these papers have in common their emphasis on how much of scientific thinking too is done with the hands. Indeed they make it clear how far-to a surprising degree-in the history of science the theorizing head has tended to be the pupil rather than the master of the working hands.
It has not always been so clear. The picture many of us inherited from an earlier phase in the philosophy of science was more one in which theory was always in the lead. Pure science took precedence over applied science. Theorists talked down to mere technicians. The best science was motivated by intellectual curiosity, and if practical applications potentially followed from it their development could and should be left to the backroom professionals. The theory of relativity, for example, had been for Einstein a work of purely abstract speculation, even if later an army of technicians would turn his insight into an atomic bomb. The discovery of the genetic code had been for Watson and Crick a thrilling exercise in reading a chemical cipher designed by evolution, even if later a whole industry of genetic engineering would be raised on it.
Yet it hardly needs saying now that this picture bore almost no resemblance to reality. For a start, as several papers in this volume show, the fact is that technological development has mostly occurred quite independently of science. Throughout most of human history, the invention of new tools and new techniques has owed little if anything to theory of any kind at all. Instead, in the fields we now call manufacture, agriculture, medicine, warfare, and so on, people have usually solved the practical problems of how to get things done more by good luck than good theoretical management-relying on trial and error, guesswork, copying (and fortunate mistakes in copying), and the selective retention of improvements-without their understanding or even asking why the eventual solutions worked. Indeed, the modem pattern of theory-led technological invention, which now seems to many of us typical, began to emerge only around two hundred years ago.
But that picture of theory being ahead of practice was unrealistic in another way as well. For not only has the development of technology until recently depended hardly at all on scientific theory, in fact scientific theory has depended very heavily on innovations in technology. It may be true that when Faraday in 1840 was asked by Queen Victoria if she might see his laboratory at the Royal Institution, he asked his assistant to go and fetch it on a tea tray. But, if so, Faraday was just showing off. The reality is that he and most of his fellow scientists would have got nowhere at all without the increasingly sophisticated tools that technology provided for them. Again and again, new theoretical insights have in fact had to wait on the invention of new instruments of observation, measurement, and manipulation: better clocks, better lenses, better centrifuges, and so on.
Nor does the role of technology in science stop there. For theoretical insights have had to wait also on the invention of new tools of thought: and, as Peter Galison describes in the riveting paper that follows, these tools of thought may sometimes have been modeled on tools of practice. Everyone knows how Watson and Crick relied for their theoretical breakthrough on the newly available X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA; but not everyone knows how Einstein may have relied for some of his key ideas about relativity on images that were put into his head by his experience as a patents' clerk reviewing applications for new gadgets and practical inventions.
Still, it would be a mistake to swing too far the other way, and to replace the old picture of theory dominating practice with an exaggeratedly post-modern picture of practice dominating theory. In reality, the relationship is complex and reciprocal with the emphasis shifting one way, then the other.
I am reminded of the renewed debate in academic psychology about how best to describe the relationship between body and mind. For most of psychology's history, the accepted picture has been the rationalist one, originating with Plato and urged further by Descartes, of there being two separate entities, body and mind. All higher intellectual faculties were assumed to belong to the queenly mind, and the body was relegated to the status of a lumpish hand-maiden. But there is now a revolution under way. As psychologists get closer to appreciating how minds and bodies really interact, they are being forced to recognize how far the body itself participates in the very processes of decision-making and intelligence that were formerly considered exclusively mental. Indeed, they are coming to see not only that the idea of a disembodied mind no longer makes theoretical sense, but that the body itself must be considered an integral part of the mind: being wise, intelligent, and even knowledgeable in its own right.
We all, it seems, think with our hands besides doing it with our heads and both together. As the three papers in this section illustrate, we do science the same way. Maybe the deep reason for this common pattern is precisely that human thinking has a fractal structure, with the same pattern of interaction between head and hands emerging at every level-cultural as well as individual-at which we engage the world.
This section on political life is broadly devoted to a consideration of how shifts in the means and terms of communication affect democracy, free expression, and the law. Alan Ryan revisits old themes in liberal discourse and theory, especially fears about the limited capacities and character of mass opinion. He worries thoughtfully about how technology is misshapen by commercial pressures and decisions about its use. The result is a paradox of less meaningful information in the context of more. His anxiety about late-twentieth-century society's capacity to govern itself in the face of these threats to genuine publics is complemented by Paul Gewirtz's learned disquisition on the mutual dependence of technology and law in our time. Faced with new technologies, American courts both adapt old principles and create new ones. The hybrid they produce has a profound effect on just the Deweyite issues Ryan raises so forcefully.
By now, students of the media have taught us that its capacity to affect behavior and belief can be overstated. Citizens are not just passive recipients of mass-produced messages. Equally, however, it is hard to imagine how a democracy can effectively function without means to transform audiences into publics. If this was the task Dewey sought to convene at our century's start, it is ever more pressing today.
Read together, Gewirtz's and Ryan's papers prod those of us concerned for the fate of liberal democracy to think hard about how the utilization of the new communications technologies and the legal rules that alter the probabilities of their application are challenges that in part are amenable to informed political and legal control. Not just our courts, but our politicians and political class, as well as ordinary citizens, have momentous decisions to take, albeit under conditions of considerable uncertainty. Because these choices demand informed debate, the very process of convoking discussion can contribute to an alleviation of the worst case scenario Ryan poses, and, in turn, can shape the climate within which key court cases of the kind Gewirtz discusses will be decided. Alas, judging from these articles, there is precious little evidence that either the current legal regime regulating broadcasting and the media or the judgments made by its managers are enhancing the public conversation we so badly need.
This entire journal issue could appropriately be dedicated to the memory of Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), who set forth its fundamental theme in Technics and Civilization:
No matter how completely technics relies upon the objective procedures of the sciences, it does not form an independent system, like the universe: it exists as an element in human culture and it promises well or ill as the social groups that exploit it promise well or ill (1934, p. 6).
Technology as part of human culture, not its antithesis; technology as an expression of imagination, not its enemy: these principles still need to be articulated and defended. Indeed, they are more important than ever before. The most important technological development in the last half-century-the development of the computer-offers particularly striking confirmation of the thesis that technology is part of culture, not an objective, independent procedure. Computational technology emerged from the quantitative calculations of ballistics trajectories, and was initially applied to the quantitative calculations of corporate bureaucracies; by the 1980s, however, computers rapidly migrated into communications and entertainment, and by the 1990s, the binary rationality of computer technology was associated as much with e-mail, web-surfing, and games as with functional number-crunching.
If this journal issue, then, is one long footnote to Technics and Civilization, this section offers a more particular and more ominous set of insights into the relationship between technology and culture. All these papers make a similar series of connections: technology as an expression of the imagination; the imagination as the irrational; the irrational as violent, aggressive, and destructive: and therefore technology as violent, aggressive, and destructive. These connections are especially emphasized by Herbert, who shows how, in the modern visual arts, technological images are routinely associated with military ones. In science fiction, surrealism, dada, photo-collage, and many other arenas, artists were trying (as Herbert quoted Raoul Haussman during the conference) "to snatch out of the chaos of wartime and revolution an optical and thoughtful new reflected image."
In short, these papers repudiate the conventional wisdom that technological images and themes express primarily logic, utility, functionality, and rationality. Instead, they emphasize what George Steiner has termed "the imagination of disaster," and its connection with technology. This connection is only too obvious, considering this century's repeated history of technological development in service of mass destruction (as Mumford himself came to realize by the time he wrote The Myth of the Machine [1967]).
In his paper, however, George Kateb refines this argument in two steps. First, he proposes that the rational and the irrational are not opposites, that the motivation behind the most apparently rational technological projects can be deeply irrational. Second, he proposes that this motivation involves a peculiarly Western hatred of the natural world, a hatred that manifests itself in a deep anger at the world as it is given and an equally deep desire to distance humanity from nonhuman creation.
Kateb's arguments suggest some interesting ways of analyzing the history of technological development. For example, if brought to bear on the postwar history of the computer, they make the story more complex than the evolution from computational rationality to communicational and playful irrationality described above. His analysis emphasizes, first, the irrational drives that were there from the beginning, in the form of the military and economic passions that were served by computing machines. Second, his argument highlights the extent to which modern computers are used to escape from earthly constraints to the apparent freedom of the placeless digital universe.
One of the high virtues of this section is the way that it calls attention to the vocabulary we use to talk about these developments. As Hollander so rightly points out, the very concept of technology is a feat of the imagination. He notes that "only literature ... can represent technology itself." He notes that modem historiography engendered the very concept, and that before the industrial age the Latin-rooted term art carried rather different associations than the Greek-based techne.
Elsewhere in this journal issue, Leo Marx pushes this analysis even further, arguing that the very concept of technology as an abstraction is dangerously alienated from the world, as it implies an impersonal agency and therefore distances human beings from the effects of what we are actually doing. In that case, it is tempting to call in the imagination as a corrective to the alienating and evasive lure of technology. But just as Marx argues that there is no singular, static entity of technology, maybe there is no such singular category of the imagination. If the Western imagination is death-centered and world-alienated, is it not possible to imagine an imagination that is eros-centered and world-loving.? The texts and works of art described in these papers are for the most part well-known products of the Western canon from classical to modem times. Much has been omitted, most notably music and film. Furthermore, we could consider scientific as well as artistic imagination; collective as well as individual; popular as well as high art; and so on.
An essential role of artistic and literary imagination is to reground us in earthly creation, to call us back from sterile abstractions to the thickness and richness of existence, both human and nonhuman. But if world alienation is such a fundamental part of Western consciousness, then will not our imagination as well as our technology be affected by that outlook? In that case, our imagination will only reinforce, not counteract, the aggression and world alienation of the technological project. The fundamental question of course is whether imagination can only express preexisting wants and needs, or whether it is powerful enough to have the capacity to rise above itself, to imagine new wants and needs, to imagine another relationship with nonhuman nature.
References Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1934). Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine:Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967).
Threading their way through much of our current discussion have been two interrelated assumptions. One is of the immense, interrelated variety of information-based, technology-enabled changes going on all around us. The other, although somewhat less explicit, is of the simultaneous, seemingly irresistible additivity of their effects. The first is neither surprising nor problematic; it probably was uppermost in most discussants' minds upon coming to this conference. But is the other really a necessary corollary of the first?
We have met in a world-metropolis where to stand still has always been unimaginable. Most of us come out of research settings that value the discovery of new, dynamic qualities more highly than the reaffirmation of older, more static ones. Being matters less than becoming, it is often said in these circumstances. Even in human affairs more generally, hope-tinged perception outweighs accurate, dispassionate measurement as a spring for action.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, recent discussions have largely avoided contingencies and complexities-those already encountered and those still to be discovered-and dealt instead with more reassuring and unproblematic visions of what is to come. Yet in our daily lives, we cannot escape knowing that the larger condition of the world is one of appalling irrationalities, injustices, disjunctures, and unintended consequences. In this concluding section, therefore, I hope we can somehow bring closer together the smooth, implicitly deterministic curves of progressive change that are so confidently projected and the obstacles and distortions to them that will surely arise from the convulsive, never truly predictable messiness of real clashes of interest and chains of events.
As it has been too largely in our considerations here, the dominance of the United States in what is currently under way is beyond question. Redundant confirmation could be provided if needed by all such conceivable indices as numbers of personal computers and Internet connections in use; openness and friendliness of capital markets to new, high-technology start-ups; density of active networks and circuitry; or the prevailing directionality of information flows. But how long will this dominance remain unchallenged? To what extent does it rest on a cycle of unevenly distributed prosperity and growth in productivity that rising market demand alone cannot indefinitely sustain?
Matching the uncertainties of technological outcomes are others affecting corporate concentrations of. power. Especially in intensely competitive, high-technology fields where global research and development, production, and marketing strategies are essential, giant firms have won substantial freedom from national constraints. Similarly unrestrained concentrations of corporate control now are reaching deeply into the media, affecting sports events, entertainment, and even what passes these days for news. But how far is the international homogenization of culture in our American image really likely to continue before it generates forces in other countries strong enough to arrest the trend?
This is a likely arena of further conflict and surprising outcomes that demands further study. Only in science, in my judgment, is the case for a new, truly global, information-based system of intercommunication and interaction compelling. There alone is the long-term outcome of present trends likely to be gratifyingly close to current, linear projections of them.
To allow myself one hoped-for perception, a U.S. particularity helping to account for our present leadership is the protection afforded by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, not only for the freedom of action and association of individuals, but of private concerns construed as individuals. Whatever else the future may hold, this should prevail on a widening international scale as a powerful force for the actuation of an Information Age that rapidly and effectively balances its social, intellectual, and economic promise with a concern for distributive justice. It is a pleasure to note that our concluding section directly addresses this issue.
Robert McC. Adams is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution. His most recently published work is Pathos of Fire: An Anthopologist's Inquiry into Western Technology (1996). His previous publications have dealt primarily with the long-term urban and agricultural development of the Near East.
Jerry Berman and Daniel J. Weitzner are Executive Director and Deputy Director, respectively, of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Their most recent publication is Abundance and User Control: Renewing the Democratic Heart of the First Amendment in the ASC of Interactive Media. They are also authors of the two successful Supreme Court challenges to the Communications Decency Act: Reno vs. ACLU. This paper is based, in part, on a presentation delivered by Mr. Weitzner at the Academy for the Third Millenium's Conference on Internet and Politics. The web page for the Center for Democracy and Technology is http://www.cdt.org
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is Professor Emerita in the History Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include The Printing Revolution in Early Modem Europe (1993), Grub Street Abroad (1992), and The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). Dr. Eisenstein is currently working on Divine Art/Infernal Machine: Western Views of Printing Surveyed.
Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History, of Science, and of Physics at Harvard University. His publications include Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997) and The Disunity of Science, coedited with David Stump. He is work ing on a history of objectivity with Lorraine Daston and has begun a study of postwar quantum field theory. The article in this issue of Social Research draws heavily on Dr. Galison's Image and Logic, just out from Chicago University Press.
Paul Gewirtz is Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Law's Stories. Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, with Peter Brooks (1996) and "The Triumph and Transformation of Antidiscrimination Law."
Robert L. Herbert is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College. Dr. Herbert is the author of "'Architecture' in Leger's Essays 1913-1933," in Architecture and Cubism (1997) and Monet on the Normandy Coast (1994). He is currently working on Renoir's Doctrine of Irregularity, The Artist's Writings on the Decorative Arts (1998).
Robert Heilbroner is Norman Thomas Professor of Economics Emeritus at The New School for Social Research. Dr. Heilbroner is the author of Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy (1996).
John Hollander is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His most recently published work is The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (1995).
Nicholas Humphrey is Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research. His publications include Leaps of Faith (1996) and A History of the Mind (1992).
William H. Janeway is the Managing Director at E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Co., LLC. His most recently published work is "The 1931 Sterling Crisis and the Independence of the Bank of England" in the Journal of Post Kenesian Economics.
George Kateb is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Dr. Kateb is the author of Emerson and Self-Reliance (1995), The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (1992), and Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984).
Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University. His most recent publication is Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik (1996).
Joshua Lederberg is Sackler Foundation Scholar and President Emeritus at the Rockefeller University, New York.
Leo Marx is Kenan Professor of American Cultural History, Program in Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Progress: Fact or Fiction? (1996) and "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress" published in Technology Review (1987).
Marvin Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recently published work is The Turing Option (a novel with H. Harrison, 1992). He is also the author of The Society of the Mind (1987), Robotics (1986), Artificial Intelligence (1972), Perceptrons (1969, enlarged edition 1988), and Semantic Information Processing (1968).
David E. Nye is Professor of American Studies at Odense University In Denmark. His most recently published works are Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (1997) and Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (1997). He is also the author of American Technological Sublime (1994), Electrifying America (1990, Dexter Prize, Abel Wolman Award), and Image Worlds (1985). Dr. Nye is currently working on Narrating Power.
Arno Penzias is Vice President and Chief Scientist at Bell labs, Lucent Technologies. He is the author of Digital Harmony (1995) and Ideas and Information (1989) and is currently working on "The Next Fifty Years," Bell Laboratories Technical Journal.
Alan Ryan is Warden at New College, Oxford University. His most recent book is John Dewey (1995).
Alan Trachtenberg is Neil Gray, Jr. Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. His most recently published work is Reading American Photographs (1989). Dr. Trachtenberg is also the author of The Incorporation of America (1982) and Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965).
Sherry Turkle is Professor of Sociology of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (1991), and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984).
Rosalind Williams is Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education and the Metcalfe Professor of Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Notes on the Underground- An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination (1990) and Dream Worlds: Mars Consumption in Late 19th Century France (1982). She is currently working on The Roots/Routes of Modem Life: Studies in Geography and Imagination.
Langdon Winner is Professor of Political Science and is Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Winner is the author of The Whale and the Reacton A Search for Limits in and Age of High Technology (1986), Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977). He is currently working on Political Artifacts: Design and the Quality of Public Life.
