Over at Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold writes a thoughtful post about blogging, the Internet, Dean, and technological determinism. There are some valuable ideas here for my Blogs and Persuasion article.
For example:
The Internet is not a thing that can be suspected as the cause of positive or negative change. It is a communication medium that affords certain ranges of action to humans; the Internet can and does interconnect devices, but we wouldn't be talking about it (or blogging, for that matter), if the Internet was not used for social communication.
He contends we cannot think about the Internet (or any technology, for that matter) as having "agency" - the ability to effect things, to create change, to initiation action. If we believe that technology has agency, then we fall into the trap of "technological determinism" - where technology rules humans and we cannot break out of that trap.
The focus, rather, needs to be on how PEOPLE use technology. The people must remain center. So, discussions of how the "Internet" helped or hindered Dean are invalid. The discussions should be centered on how people used the Internet in their quest to elect/promote Dean.
I believe that blogging is an important tool to add to the professional communicator's toolkit. Because of the nature of the technology, it creates a powerful channel of communication. But, people must fill this channel with valuable, persuasive information, rather than noise, in order to create change.
However, and here is where I am in some disagreement with Howard, I am not sure that technology doesn't have agency. Maybe it does. There is a group of theorists who believe it does, including Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Latour created something called "Actor Network Theory" (ANT), which analyses how people -- and things -- all interact in networks. The theory is very powerful in that it helps you to see the interconnectedness of things and people, and gives you a method of charting power flows among the network. I think ANT is very powerful for communications purposes, so one can see where application of power or of persuasion could have great effect.
In these analyses, it seems that things do indeed have power (agency?), especially once they are "black boxed" (their inner workings concealed). Because we don't understand or know the decisions that went into their construction, we must in some way take them as a item with some self-contained power/agency. [An example is the PET scan (Check out Dr. Joseph Dumit's work at MIT). Decisions were made during its development that results would be in color. Certain colors were chosen. Colors have a stronger impact on lay person's minds when they are making a decision. Insurance companies are using PET scan results to deny converage for certain mental illnesses. Does the PET have agency then? -- I am not describing this perfectly, but hopefully you get the picture.]
Or, to put it back into the communications framework, perception is reality here. People use technology to demonstrate power ("we are denying you coverage based on your PET scan"). The denied person therefore perceives that a technology (the PET scan) has power, therefore it does. As PR people, we deeply understand the power of perception.
Therefore, perhaps you could argue then, the blogs have agency. That they can persuade because people perceive/believe they can....
Of course, blogs aren't really black boxed completely yet, but they are getting close to it, as most technologies do when they enter a mass market.
In the debate among philosphers, STSers and others about technological determinism (at least in the books and papers I have read), a major missing link is that of perception. If people believe they are living in a world determined by technology, leaving them powerless, they will act that way. Therefore, they are living in such a world. And all of the claims that "we are human, and therefore always will have control over technology" becomes highly problemmatic.
I am all over the map here, but I am using this space as a way to explore my thoughts on these subjects. I'd love to hear from you what you think....
wow ... what a blog maven... how do you find time to work...
of course i somehow found time to write...
jerry
maui r and r
Posted by: JERRY PALMER | February 10, 2004 at 08:11 PM