Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Technology: The Digital Sublimation of the Electrical Sublime

199 Technology The Digit a l S ubl imat ion of t he El ect r ica l S ubl ime St even Jones Technology is a lot like the weather. It influences us in myriad untold ways; directly or indirectly, it affects everything from our behavior to our physical health and our mental outlook. Like the weather, technology is often in the news. And we try our best to forecast and predict it, but its unpredictability continues to foil us. We know the sources of weather; that is, we know in scientific terms what causes it. Similarly, we know who creates a particular technology, but we know little about the way it works or its likely operation, and we know it best only in the present, as it is happening to us, and in the past, in the stories we tell about its impact on us at some time (usually long) ago.1 And we talk a lot about both, a similarity more pronounced recently. An increasing number of people now talk about technology at least as much as, if not more than, they talk about the weather. Today, technology is * almost exclusively electronic (even primarily mechanical devices, such as automobiles, now rely on electronics and use electricity); 200 Steven Jones * almost entirely computer driven (chips are, it seems, in everything; some municipalities in the United States are even debating requiring identity chips be placed in pets); * highly miniature, and even nanoscale, with such technologies already redefining how we imagine “small”; * largely silent, so that we do not hear it working but for the occasional noise of a fan or an alarm; * converging, at least insofar as a single device can do multiple things; * and internally information oriented (machines are always providing information, telling us something, whether we wish to know it or not, as with automobile alerts saying, “The door is ajar”). Of course, technology differs from the weather above all in that the latter is natural, found in nature, and the former is not. Yet technology—particularly modern, digital, networked communication technology—is coming to seem more natural. This is partly because it is being woven into all manner of everyday routines and partly because it is increasingly invisible and silent. Only fifty years ago technology was predominately mechanical, large and therefore visible, loud, and built for a single purpose. There was no missing it, and at least early on, there were no attempts to hide it. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can one find efforts to incorporate communication technology into the landscape of everyday life. The effort was led by phonograph makers, who sought to highlight the record player’s role “as edifying musical furniture, an unobtrusive presence in the idealized environment of family life” (Barnett 1996, 301;see also Kruse 1993; for a more general discussion of technology, domestic life, and the home, see Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). Not surprisingly, the technology that carried the human voice was among the very first modern technologies to find a place in the home. Yet while loud and visible, technology prior to digitalization told little about itself and its workings. The information given to its users was at best obscure. Users needed to troubleshoot should something go wrong; there was little if any feedback, such as error codes or logs. One needed to dig around underneath the hood of an automobile for clues about a problem, or listen for sounds from the engine, or study the color of exhaust from the tailpipe. Even in the case of early computers one had to decipher their inner working by looking at a series of lights on a panel or examining software code and other sorts of readouts.2 Now, more types of technology allow people to communicate with one another. There is also more communication between people and technology. And there is more communication between devices of which users may often be unaware. Tec h nol og y 201 Technology, Culture, and Scholarship Despite all these changes in technology that emerged in the past 150 or so years, we have progressed very little in understanding technology as an element of culture . Perhaps that is because technology has come to seem increasingly natural. Perhaps because digital technologies have, since the 1980s, seemed less revolutionary and more evolutionary, they draw less of our attention. In cultural studies the literature regarding technology is wide ranging; a tour...