Technology and social change

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We're told all the time that technology is the great driver of social change. However, if technology is innovation, it can't be such a great driver. That’s because innovation just means first use and first use isn't going to change the nature of the world.

So that doesn't work.

The question might then be: does the technology that we use change the world we live in? Then we’d have to understand the whole range of technologies that we use. The answer to the question ‘Does technology drive change?’ is that we don’t know. We don’t know what technologies are out there or how important they are. We have a much better idea of the nature of society and our world community than we do of the material elements of our world. Therefore, if we were to ask ourselves whether it’s technology or our society that shapes the world, we couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

Grand historical arguments

We do find lots of arguments being made that this or that technology is changing the world: digital is transforming the world today. The steam engine transformed the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Electricity transformed the world around 1900. We hear these arguments all the time. They are called technologically determinist arguments. However, they're typically very poor technologically determinist arguments because the response might be, well, it's not electricity that changed the world around 1900, it was coal. Or if it wasn't coal, it was new forms of metal cutting. Moreover, if it wasn't that, it was the discovery of rubber. There's always the possibility that another technology was more important than the one selected for these grand historical arguments about the world’s transformation through technology.

The great transforming technologies of the present might be market technologies rather than digital ones. For instance, they might be cheaper ways of manufacturing copper cable, or more efficient fuels for aeroplanes, or more efficient jet engines.

The point is that people don't feel it’s necessary to explain the alternative arguments. We’re asked to take on trust these grand historical arguments about past, present and future. Most of the time — nearly 100% of the time, I would say — these claims simply don’t stand up. We attribute change to particular technologies but nearly always to the same ones. These arguments carry great authority, despite being empirically extraordinarily weak.

To understand technology, drop “technology”

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A better approach to understanding technology starts with dropping the word “technology”. Once we do that, we can start asking serious questions about the makeup of our world, its material constitution and how it's changed over time. It quickly becomes clear that all sorts of things that were new 100 or 200 years ago are ubiquitous today. That's to say, all sorts of novelties have entered into our world. We also know that we use energy and materials more efficiently than we used to. We make many new kinds of things in many new kinds of ways.

However, answering the question of how important invention has been in transforming our world remains extraordinarily difficult. We don't have an inventory of inventions. Nor do we have an inventory of the significance of these inventions. Still, we certainly can say that the reason human society is so much more productive today than it was in 1950 or 1900 or 1800 is precisely that we have transformed our ability to change the materials around us into new things. How we've done that, let alone why, is a challenging question to answer.

That’s my main message: that the problem with the concept of technology is that we’re too ready to believe that we know all about it and its effects. What I'm saying is that we know remarkably little about it. Additionally, most of the claims that are made for it are dubious in the extreme.

America without railways?

One way to assess a particular technology’s historical significance is to imagine what would happen if we suddenly took it out of our lives.

We might ask ourselves: how important is the computer? We’d then go through a mental exercise of saying, well, if we didn't have a computer, our trains would stop, our aeroplanes wouldn't fly, this film couldn't be made, I couldn't book a holiday, schools would collapse and so on. We're using computers for all sorts of different things now, and in this model of thinking, the computer accounts for a massive proportion of our activities.

Nevertheless, that's an incorrect way of thinking about the problem. We can illustrate this using a famous example from the economic historian Robert Fogel, who asked himself how important was the railway in the expansion of the United States and the growth of its economy in the late 19th century. Economic historians assume that without railways, nothing that was transported by railway could be moved. Therefore, since a lot of stuff, people and things were transported by railway in the United States in, say, the 1890s, giving up the railway would have meant giving up an awful lot. However, Fogel said that’s not correct, because if we hadn’t used railways in the United States in the 1890s, we would have used other means of transportation. We'd have used wagons or canal boats. All sorts of alternatives to railways exist. Accordingly, to ask how significant the railway is, you also need to ask how much of a difference the railway made to transportation over and above the other means of transportation that we could have used.

We can live without computers

As regards computers, the question is not what would happen if all the computers stopped. The question is, how much better are computers at doing the things we use them for today than non-computers would be?

After all, there was a time when we had an excellent educational system without a single computer. There was a time when we made magnificent motion pictures without computers. There was a time where we organised extraordinarily complicated railway timetables without computers. Thus, the measure of the importance of the computer is how much better we can make films or run railways or whatever by using this technology.

The fundamental point at the heart of all this is that there are alternatives to most, but certainly not all – let's use the word – technologies. Indeed, it’s quite interesting to think about what technologies there are no alternatives to. I think in some respects, electricity is something we'd find very difficult to find alternatives for. In many cases, however, we could replace electricity with other forms of energy. For example, we lived most of our history without electric light. That didn't mean we didn't have light. It’s a similar case with heating. However, the significance of technology is not to be measured by the extent of its use. It's to be measured through a comparison, that's often very difficult to make, with the alternatives to that technology.

Imitators, not innovators

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Since the 1990s, we’ve been told that we live in an era of vibrant innovation. We are told, are we not, that we all have to be innovators; that we all have to be entrepreneurial. We’re always claiming to be doing things in new ways in our resumes.

In fact, we are rarely doing things in new ways; we are imitating. We even imitate the extent to which we are all supposed to be innovative. Indeed, the mere fact that we are all supposed to be innovative tells us in reality that we are profoundly imitative. Still, the ideology of innovation and entrepreneurship has been a profoundly important feature of our world. It tells us all the time that the world is changing so fast that what we know of the past no longer has any relevance to the present or future. Again, it's a profoundly political understanding and use of the concept of innovation.

My own view is that we don't live in a particularly innovative era. The kinds of things that we have around us have changed in significant ways. Yet many are profoundly familiar. We live in a world of motor cars and trains and aeroplanes and cameras and movies and television – and, indeed, computers. However, we’ve lived in such a world for many decades. It's quite hard to point to profoundly important novelties: things we haven’t seen before. Hence, that rhetoric of innovation doesn't correspond to the reality of change in the world around us or indeed the change in our own lives.

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The myths around technology

Vinsel, E., & Russell, A. L. (2020). The Innovation Delusion: How our obsession with the new that has disrupted the work that matters the most. Currency.

Fogel, R.W. (1962). A Quantitative Approach to the Study of Railroads in American Economic Growth: A Report of Some Preliminary Findings. The Journal of Economic History, 22(2), 163–197.

Edgerton, D. (2020, November 18). Cummings has left behind a No 10 deluded that Britain could be the next Silicon Valley. The Guardian.