Technology: what is it? A tool? A way to do things? A process? Is it applied knowledge? Is it science? Progress?

Maybe it’s all of those things. However, as the infomercial host says, ‘but wait! There’s more! ‘ You shouldn’t finish this class thinking that science and technology are equivalent. There are certainly lots of tools, processes, ways to do things, that weren’t developed as a product of science. That are thousands of years old. You should be able to think of some. You should understand that technology is more than the sum of its parts. It embodies the values of the culture from whence it came. And often carries those values as baggage of sorts when it spreads to other cultures, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And you should ask yourself, coming from a society that embraces change and innovation like few others, ‘have we ever met a technology we couldn’t learn to love (and then discard)?’

Sociotechnical systems

In industrial society, we speak not only of technologies but of complex systems. We don’t think much about this unless one of these systems fails–the garbage doesn’t get collected for a while, there’s a boil order on the local water supply, the power goes out for an extended period of time, a gas pipeline is disrupted, a major interstate highway closed, or a major airport, or phone service or wi-fi or cable (OMG!) goes out. These systems are complex combinations of people, technologies, and artifacts (products of technology, tools, etc.), in some sort of organizational context. They have been constructed for most all facets of our lives:

• Food production
• Drinking water
• Sewage
• Transportation
• Financial, economic
• Land management
• Energy, electricity
• Telecommunications
• Health care
• Defense (or offense, as the case may be)
• Waste disposal
• Education

You wouldn’t talk about paddy rice farming in Vietnam, as productive as it might be, as a complex sociotechnical system. It’s likely pretty self-contained, has a minimal number of elements to it (the people and animals and tools used), and may merely be organized around the village unit, or some extended family organization. However that family organization, rules about property rights, connections to religious practices or ritual, etc., could be complex. One could definitely say that paddy rice production, though functionally similar, bears little resemblance to industrial wheat farming on the North American Great Plains. Many of the easily observable differences spring from the different sources of energy upon which a system might rely.

Dependence on fossil fuels will have more ecological impacts than dependence on human or animal power. Although those impacts may not be experienced locally as such, the ‘disorder’ may be found elsewhere in the system. Maybe locally, we can smell the impacts of animal power, We know some land will have to be devoted to feeding and sustaining them, but the coal-fired power plant can have local, regional, even global consequences for the environment. Technologies can affect the environment–remember the POET model.

When technologies spread, so do cultural values

But, technologies can also carry cultural baggage. As Melvin Kranzberg, Professor of History and Technology, once said, ‘technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.’ There are two insights to glean from this. One, the technology can be used for various purposes, some to better humanity, some to sow destruction, etc. Good and evil and that sort of thing. But that doesn’t really get us very far in understanding technology’s impacts on society, whether environmental or otherwise.

Technologies come from somewhere. They don’t just appear out of thin air. They originate from cultures with certain values. We discussed in class the idea of technology as progress. This itself is a value, one that is not shared by all cultures. Some believe strongly in maintaining traditions, and are quite resistant to technological change. It’s hard for us sometimes to even understand that sort of mentality, but it’s out there, quite prevalent and legitimate, especially among long-enduring rural societies.

Nuclear power is an extreme example of looking at ‘technology as progress.’ It’s a risky technology, not only because of the chain reactions and the heat generated to turn turbines and produce electricity, but because spent fuel rods are radioactive for thousands of years, must be stored, and will ultimately contaminate the environment. Nuclear technology requires security measures to keep dangerous materials restricted. It is more likely to require some sort of centralized organization–unless we decide we want everyone to have their own personal nuclear reactors in their houses. As the bumper sticker sez, though, ‘I like you, but I wouldn’t want to see you working with subatomic particles.’

In short, technologies are value-laden. And when we export them to other cultures, other parts of the world, it isn’t just the technology that is exported. It is the values that go with it–whatever infrastructure is required, perhaps greater dependence on parts, energy imports, services and expertise unavailable locally, an ethic about the environment, etc. Consider the example industrial agriculture. Here are some of the values embodied in that particular model of producing food:

• Private property
• Profit making (capitalism)
• Mass production
• Values:
  • income maximization, versus minimizing risk;
  • scale (big is good, even necessary);
  • capitalism and productivity;
  • nature as a set of resources for humans
• Human control over nature
• Use of non-renewable resources
• Regional, national or global production and consumption
• Who benefits? Foreign currency, dependence, ecological disruptions, cheaper food but for whom? Farmers? Consumers? Monsanto? Kraft? The World Bank? Free marketeers? Starbucks’ customers?

Essayist and farmer Wendell Berry points out quite nicely the differences between industrial agriculture and local agriculture, based on local knowledge and local resources. Yes, it’s difficult to have world trade and access to all kinds of products if one only has access to goods produced locally. That’s his point. But that access comes at a cost, and much of the cost is environmental.

Appropriate technology

Economist Ernst Schumacher wrote in the 1970s, in his book Small is Beautiful, about ‘intermediate’ technology. He was mostly talking about the third world, and the export of industrial technologies as part of the third world development model. However his ideas apply universally because these technologies have so many negative environmental consequences, regardless of where they end up. The model of exporting industrial technology is unsustainable as currently practiced, and the notion that all societies could adopt it and increase their resource consumption to U.S.-style levels is intriguing, to say the least (we use about 25% of the world’s resources with 4-5% of the world’s people). Here are some of the characteristics of what might be called more ‘appropriate’ technology, adapted to local circumstances, socioeconomic and cultural conditions, and environmental constraints:

• Local conditions (relies on local knowledge and expertise)
• Local resource availability (reduces dependence)
• Ecologically sustainable
• Low pollution rate
• Appropriate energy sources (rules out nuclear-powered espresso machines)
• Locally producible, benefiting local economies
• Durable
• Labor intensive (why?)

For example, in rural Africa, women use a mortar and pestle to pound millet and remove the hull for processing and cooking. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive. Some ‘development’ projects have tried to introduce diesel-powered grain mills to reduce or eliminate the drudgery. Think about costs and benefits between the two kinds of technologies, and how those might be distributed. Contrast the diesel-powered mill with the mortar and pestle that most women use 1-2 hours a day to pound the grain to prepare meals. The latter would be drudgery. But the diesel grain mill would require women to have some income to pay to use it. It could be quite large and serve several villages. It could require a spare parts network, someone to be trained in repair, a fund to pay for repairs, a place to put it, someone to keep the books, etc. What would be perhaps a more appropriate alternative to diesel as a fuel or energy source? Would there be another way, maybe more labor-intensive, to get similar benefits? We also discussed women’s use of ropes and bags to draw water from open wells. A pulley might be a simple intermediate technology that reduces some of the drudgery of that activity. What would be a technology with a higher level of energy consumption, that may not be appropriate to an agrarian society?

Another example mentioned in class was the seat belt. Yes, the seat belt is low-tech, for the most part. However, some seat belts are automatic, and fasten when you get in the car and hit the ignition. Then we have air bags, restraint systems. And add to this the fact that the seat belt is attached to a multi-ton vehicle, which when driven fast and uncontrollably tends to crash and cause injuries, and without which the need for a seat belt would be somewhat obviated. Another example was the bicycle. Is it more appropriate than the auto? Well, maybe for some populations in some instances. It wouldn’t be for someone who has a 75-mile daily commute to work. Maybe some sort of mass transit system is more appropriate. Is that local? No. But we can at least say it is more appropriate than one person per car heading into town every day.

Back to the bicycle. I’ve seen many of them in Africa, they are highly valued by people in rural areas with little other access to transportation, and they generally get beat up and abused. Why? Partly because few people have the resources to take really good care of them. Partly because the environment is harsh, there is a long dusty dry season in many areas, and people use them in different ways than we do. People haul lots of stuff on them to market and back, they take people on the back into town with them, etc. And generally they get lent out often–unused capital as scarce and valuable as a bike is fair game in a society organized around reciprocity and subsistence food production. There are also lots of burrs and seeds that work their ways into the tires and cause flats as well. Are local needs for transportation incorporated into the design of bicycles produced in Africa or imported for sale there? Generally not. They’re manufactured elsewhere. If the bicycles did reflect local conditions and realities, they’d have structural reinforcements to allow someone to sit more comfortably on the back, the pedals would be made to withstand thermonuclear warfare, and the tires would be developed to be practically impervious to thorny or spiny seeds. They would be appropriate to the conditions under which they were to be used in Africa, rather than to the conditions under which they were used or developed somewhere else.

And an example of inappropriate technology would be?

• Ecologically unsound
• Requiring a high degree of centralized control (either corporate or governmental, for instance, or computerized automobiles)
• Polluting
• High energy use
• Of limited utility over time (e.g., disposable batteries, cell phones requiring continuous upgrades)
• Lend themselves to global trade
• Corrosive of local culture
• Vulnerable to misapplications (military technologies, nano-technologies)

Can you come up with examples on this campus of technologies that could be appropriate or inappropriate? Is the concept one that the industrial world should even discuss? Or is it irrelevant for us? Why is it that appropriate technologies haven’t taken off? What’s holding them back?

The Suburbs (based on Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier)

Some key characteristics:

1. Peripheral location (out of inner cities)
2. Low density (away from the jobs-need for cars-sprawl)-space and its costs-how about environmentally? Getting services out there, taking care of waste, etc.)
3. Architectural sameness (why? Cheap! Uniformity of product)
   1. Cheap production techniques
   2. Lack of character (we talked about design being driven by energy efficiency …)
4. Production for the masses (like the Model T)-dream of a home is now affordable
   1. And so is debt
   2. And sprawl
5. economic and racial homogeneity-blacks were denied entrance into Levittown for 20 years at the least, and there are still many neighborhoods that are largely segregated, if not formally so.

Is suburbanization a technology? Maybe not. But the process of suburbanization wouldn’t be possible without some technological innovations, such as pre-fabricated construction practices used at Levittown, or road and traffic systems. Some of the key impacts are:

• isolation of inner city poor–they have few transportation options to get to the jobs, no way out, because in many cases they were excluded from suburbs, even where they had money to leave. As a result, inner cities decline, property values decline, school revenue (and quality) declines, etc. Most of the poor were non-white, and intentionally excluded from the suburbs for decades.
• weakening of the extended family–people can live in separate houses. If you think the TV is responsible for the breakup of the nuclear family, suburbanization might be your culprit for breakup of the extended family. No value judgments here, just a social observation.
• isolation of women not in the workforce–the jobs went to GIs returning from WWII. Along with isolation came appliances, because no longer was there a readily available domestic workforce close by–in fact one of the points of moving to the suburbs for many was to separate from the lower classes. Did technology liberate women in the home? Or did it allow them to enter into the workforce in greater numbers and still have time to clean the house at the end of the day??
• decay of central cities–the process mentioned above. The 1960s were a period of urban decay and lots of urban ‘renewal’ projects, with major traffic upgrades (e.g., interstates coming through your living room) require razed neighborhoodsl
• car culture, and the decline of public transportation–what could be more American? And what could have a larger impact, in terms of a society’s organization and use of energy, especially oil?

Can you tell this story using the POET model?