White Heat, Caroll Pursell;
concluding chapter:
My assessment of the content is entitled:
Gender, nature, & culture in contemporary society.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
"Welcome to the Information Age:"
"During the 1980s alone, American business spent an astonishing $1 trillion on information technology....the return on investment to be fifty-four percent for manufacturing and sixty four percent for business as a whole."
p. 195.
"The US is actually 10th in the world with respect to high speed internet access, behind Japan, Korea, Slovenia, and Finland."
But fiber optics cables are not widespread in US, but the Bell systems refused to follow through, and American pay more than other nation's citizens do and receive slower service. "
Rick Karr, PBS reporter.
Pursell uses information meaning to : notify, apprise, tell, instruct; hence a message to inform us conveys meaningful words, sounds and images.
Thesis | Questions | antecedents | Contemporary Events | Consider this | conclusion | Politics
Technology changes the boundaries and the measures
of what was previously defined as normal and acceptable behavior.
For example he defines reengineering, standardization and the telecommunications revolution that are represented by --but more often obscured-- by the term The Information Age or the Information Revolution.
"Historian Joseph J. Corn also calls attention to the fact that, however wildly inaccurate predictions of the technological future might prove to be, they have been taken as credible, and even desirable by so many people give them a force as historical realities."
p. 217.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Defining pornography and the boundaries of the appropriate behavior in an age dominated by long-distance telecommunications technology as a web of "waves and radiation" (to borrow Don DeLillo's often repeated term).
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
"the technological sublime"
"antecedents to today."
The steam engine possessed elements of the sublime.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Concepts of the divine have changed altering the boundary between the
sacred and the profane:
"Mother Nature" (prehistoric and pagan)
"Father Time" (prehistoric and pagan)
God the father, son and holy spirit (Roman Empire and Christian)
There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger (Medieval and Islamic)What is definitively masculine as opposed to feminine, is altered by technology, according to Pursell in this and the previous chapter entitled, Dirt and Disorder. (see pp. 170 to end of the chapter)
God as male, Goddess as female, versus God (Hindu) as a hermaphrodite, having both gender's qualities.
John Updike, in a 1990s novel, suggests that God is a computer program.
Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
current, happening now, or affecting today directly.
Columbia space shuttle disaster reveals the importance of:
telemetry
"Flight data recorders"
photography and
simulations
Advanced knowledge or (trouble-shooting) contingency planning because the disaster could technically have and operationally should have been avoided.
For instance, photography revealed that:
The disaster was caused by the impact of a foam component hitting the left wing on take off and going uncorrected, but not unnoticed by NASA engineers, but it was ignored by managing personnel who make decisions.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Consideration:
Technology creates our experiences -- so does it create our concepts of god,
sexually appropriate behavior, the value of people, the significance of nature, and the importance of human integrity?
What examples are there in Pacey, Pursell and Postman, or other authors (Langdon Winner, Melvin Kranzberg, or Lewis Mumford) that technological changes inherently harbor powers to change the tools, the tool users and the worlds in which the tools are used?
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Pursell and Pacey argue that technological demands may redefine gender roles and also the acceptable behavior of men and women, such as driving cars (a privilege forbidden to women in Saudi Arabia), or smoking cigarettes, or wearing pants.
Men by the same measure may raise children, keep households, prepare dinner or earn less income than do women because of the organizational and technical power of tools to transform the workplace, work sites and the labor performed.
The irony of modern, that is automated technology, for Postman is that we are not prepared for these wide reaching changes. One indicator if such power is that automation has minimized the physical requirements necessary for machine assisted jobs (radio operator, computers, xerox repair, electricians) so that very little separates men's from women's capabilities in the work force.
Yet the irony of industrialization is that as the differences between the genders in the workplace became less and less dependent on physical strength and endurance, the cultural disparity grew in defining women's work and men's work as separate and distinct. All the while automation made such distinctions irrelevant from the standpoint of the technical demands of people in the workforce, women were relegated to separate and unequal jobs.
As the differences between genders diminished as far as technical considerations were concerned; the cultural distinctions between men and were exaggerated by societies undergoing rapid social transformation.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Pursell, very much like Postman, also argues that technology redefines social constructs replacing older important centers of attention with newly significant core ideas or patterns of behavior. By that he suggests power to decide what is important is altered by technology -- information technology allows the shop floor or the sales representatives of a company to have direct impact on managers, without having to be filtered by intervening staff or "middle managers."
Pursell also argues that technology redefines the world when in an analogous comparison to the Euro centric definition of "Orientalism" meaning the Asian world and its older cultures, Pursell asserts that Europeans and their American cousins have defined "modernity" or modern as synonymous with "progress."
"As Orientalism has taught us, the Other is always a cultural construction, something we have imagined to better define ourselves. Perhaps this is true of technology as well."
p. 219
This is especially true of technical inventions that placed Europe and America at the center of world events. By doing this we have used technology to dominate other societies. Pacey's example of this is Cecil Rhodes creation of the colony in Rhodesia, today called Zambia and Zimbabwe. Technology allows powerful cultures to define and thus marginalizes less powerful peoples.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Pursell's conclusion:
Information as a form of definitive power,
power is the ability to alter circumstances and conditions
synonyms for power are: potency, force, might, puissance, strength.
Pacey -- the power to mark territory, alter physical conditions,
value nature or things.
Pursell -- "Technology is the material manifestation of social relations, tools are concrete commitments to certain ways of doing things and therefore certain ways of dividing power."
p. 218.
"technologies are hardly neutral" (219)
"The choice of means itself always carries consequences." (218)
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
"People have always lived in an information age."
The question is what determines the difference among data, meaning & knowledge?
"Like other technologies, those organized around the storage, transmission, and analysis of information are hardly neutral. On the most obvious level (this technology) cannot but widen the gap between those who are already privileged and those who are not."
p. 219.
The divine | Appropriate gender behavior | Valuing of labor | Uses of language | irony of industrialization
Thesis | Questions | antecedents | Contemporary Events | Consider this | conclusion | Politics
