The
concluding paper by Jonathan
Grudin, for the past two
years with Microsoft Research, dealt with "Irresistible
Forces and Immovable Objects." The "forces" referred to
technologies and their development, while the "objects" were
people. His key statement is summarized in the abstract of
his paper (which is the only text existing in the
Proceedings) in this way: "I am of the persuasion that the
Web and wireless technologies are 'irresistible forces' that
will merge and transform the world more than all but a
handful of past technologies. But everything is possible.
The most immovable of objects is human
biology..."
In a way, Grudin
connected up with central statements of his presentation in
1996, which I mentioned initially. The results he explained
then about handling electronic diaries indicated how new
technology added different structures to the visibility of
information (in this case, dates of appointments, etc.), and
also led to different patterns of behavior. In this paper,
in which retraced important stages and factors showing how
"scholarship" is changing in times of the Internet, he also,
and primarily so, referred to this "visibility." In the same
way in which neighbors did mind how I, as an owner, built
and painted my house, the information presented in the
Internet had to be seen: "The increased visibility has
constrained the way we use our proprietary, the way how we
act on our machines." When we return to a web site after
some time and no longer find it, we are forced to conclude
that the person concerned had the right to remove it.
However, he or she may also receive electronic mail with
inquiries, and the pages removed will be renegotiated as a
consequence. Technology had always both liberating and
restricting forces; how they acted together (or against each
other) in the long term was the decisive
question.
In actual fact,
Grudin, as he found out by initially inquiring among
the audience, rather tends to feel that the technological
forces play a decisive role. On a four-level scale ranging
from "hard technological determinism" to "soft determinism"
to "co-determinisms" (with a balance between technological
and social forces), and to "non-determinism" (dominance of
social control over development), he ranked himself "1.5,"
while the majority of the auditence were more inclined
towards the softer control concepts. That this point of view
triggered off lengthy discussions after the presentation,
was to be expected. However, this self-characterization
should not be understood to imply that the author failed to
recognize cultural integration and domination. Quite on the
contrary, many of his examples show that he does perceive
the cultural superstructure dominating technical
developments. However, whether a society is truly the master
of technical developments and their applications, is
something which we can justly doubt along with
him.
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