Communications

To the editor:

Rosalind Williams's thought-provoking essay on her experiences as a scholar-administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("'All That Is Solid Melts into Air': Historians of Technology in the Information Revolution," October 2000) has provoked so many thoughts of my own that I am compelled to write some of them down. Hers is indeed a key perspective, coming from within the ranks of what is probably the most cutting-edge institution of technology in the United States, if not the world. If the technology she describes may be likened to a tsunami that overwhelms everything in its path, Dr. Williams has spent half a decade surfboarding on the leading edge of the wave. In the process, she has concluded that whatever engineering used to be, "engineering" is no longer the right word for it today. The old vision of progress in the service of mankind has given way to a technological determinism that makes the direst prophecies of Jacques Ellul sound mild. As an engineer and a professor of engineering, I both agree and disagree with her.

First, the points of agreement. As associate head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1996 to 1999, I also had to grapple with questions of what engineering really is. From a course-content perspective, it is not hard to distinguish between computer engineers (who deal mostly with hardware) and computer scientists (who deal mostly with software). But I do admit to feeling some concern that the courses in software engineering on our campus were offered not by our department but by computer science professors. This concern arose not out of any anxiety that they would not do a good job but from the realization that a fuzzy new category of "engineering" was manifesting itself in course titles in the College of Arts and Sciences, of all places.

This was a particular example of what philosopher and ethicist Michael Davis, in his essay "Defining 'Engineer': How to Do It and Why It Matters" (Journal of Engineering Education 85 [April 1996]), has called the "complex negotiation of social arrangements" that goes on whenever a curriculum changes. Although I did not think about it at the time in those terms, that is exactly what it was. What I did not think about so much was the obvious fact that new and better computers had to be provided every two to three years for faculty and students alike, along with software upgrades and the whole complex and expensive set of auxiliary items from networking to licensing needed to keep our department's membership in the late twentieth century up to date. I can confirm that most people inside the system of engineering education and research view this need more or less in the terms Williams uses, as "a sweeping, all-encompassing process of technological and social upheaval" (p. 652). The sixty-year-old professor who has to learn how to type his own letters in Microsoft Word, the print shop workers thrown out of work by the advent of laser printers, and everyone who has ever spent any time trying to fix a problem related to a computer--all these people are touched by the process Williams describes in old-fashioned terms of technological determinism. She describes that aspect of the situation accurately, although its intensity at MIT probably exceeds that at less prestigious institutions simply because MIT feels obliged to keep ahead of everyone else.

Williams goes astray, I believe, when she poses as simple contradictions the two alternatives of either technology in service to society or technology as driven by the free market. Specifically, she says that the "key ambiguity of our 'technological age' is the contradiction between our faith in solving social and environmental problems through technology--which implies social control of technology--and our faith in the free and uncontrolled market as the engine of technological development" (p. 665). Karl Marx would agree with her that trusting capitalism to lead to anything like progress or the solution...