Introduction:The wheel of technology rolls on with time. In our current age of information and interconnectedness, it has become imperative to understand its social and anthropological implications and connections. Contrary to the earlier held view, we have now started to realize that technology and
society are not independent of each other, but rather evolve dynamically, each shaping and influencing the other in ways both direct and subtle. Following Professor Langdon Winner's seminal paper titled "Do Artifacts have Politics?", we now appreciate that any new technology can both empower and oppress us. In the words of Bruno Latour, technologies offer us possibilities, affordances and permissions, and thus effectively participate in politics and need to be represented.
Politics everywhere?
Though it may seem counter-intuitive at first that artifacts can be associated with politics, evidence for the same appears in many places, if we only know where to look, and how. From the low hanging bridges of New York and the allegedly biased content of Wikipedia to the steep pricing of Apple products in Indian markets, one finds several instances of seemingly impartial technologies turning out to have a deep-rooted political or social motivation. Here, we must be careful since such artifacts always have an interpretive flexibility, and our interpretation of them may not necessary match those of its designer. Apple for instance, may simply be intent on maximising its profits and Wikipedia has so much data input that it may be difficult for it to continuously monitor its quality standards. Another example is Vaucanson's automatic loom, which some biographers ascribe as his way on exacting revenge on the silk workers who ran him out of town. However, the real reason may have been his intention of transforming the boundaries between intelligent and non-intelligent work. By looking at technology and society as a whole and not as independent entities, we can enhance our understanding of several artifacts and reason regarding whether or not a particular artifact is politically motivated.
A case study we consider is that of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's famous internet browser.
The browser wars:
Browser wars is a metaphorical term that refers to competitions for dominance in usage share in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote a specific rivalry: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during the late 1990s. At this time, there were two major internet browsers - Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Netscape, initially beginning with a large market share was a small company generating a good bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product. Microsoft's vast resources on the other hand allowed it to bundle its less popular internet browser free along with Windows for its users. Since at that time Windows had an over 90% share of the desktop operating system market, almost all the users who bought Windows stuck to Internet Explorer, having nothing to compare with and no particular advantage in switching over to Netscape.
While this strategy gained Windows dominance over the web browser market as well, some consider it an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly on operating systems to unfairly dominate the market and eliminate competition. Microsoft on the other hand, claimed that the merger of Windows and Explorer was inevitable, since the two were now the same product, and consumers were getting all the benefits of Internet Explorer for free. Here again we see the interpretive flexibility of a digital artifact. Is this Politics though? Can the actions of a company wanting to maximize its profits in a free market be considered politics? It's upto us to decide, and eventually culminated in the famous United States vs Microsoft series of lawsuits.
Conclusion:
The long held belief that technology and society evolve independently from each other has been conclusively shown to be false and the metaphor of 'the arrow of progress' leading from science to technology and eventually to social progress is no longer valid. As Arturo Escobar says, any new technology represents a 'cultural invention' in the sense that it brings forth a new world. It is from this new 'domain of anthropological practice' that we arrive at several conclusions about the inter-connectedness of society and technology, the relevant one in this essay being that artifacts do indeed, have politics.
References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
[2] http://www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/presse_art/GB-06%20DOMUS%2006-04.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
[4] Notes on an anthropology of cyberculture, by Arturo Escobar
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