LECTURE: Week (3) - The technological workplace

This lecture will be held Tuesday, February 9, 2:30pm-3:45pm central time -- live in-person in 3650 Humanities and simultaneously streamed online at go.wisc.edu/n6986j for remote viewing.  The lecture recording and slides will be posted below within 24 hours.

Hi everybody.  In this week's lecture videos, instead of a narrated set of slides, I want to show you a series of promotional (persuasive, advertising, "visioning") videos about different types of office technology proposed at different historical moments over the past century -- these provide a tour about what people meant when they argued we live in an "information society" at each of these points in time.  

Below is the full lecture discussion that incorporates snippets of most of the videos.  The original videos are also linked separately below for you to view in their entirety.

Download Slides - INTER-LS 215 week (3) - Spring 2021.pdf

  

Some useful concepts to start with 

Before watching these videos, let's define two key concepts that social scientists and historians use to understand how new technologies are developed, deployed, and understood by society:

  • Technological Determinism.  This term points to assumptions we often make about the development and adoption of new technology being predictable, inevitable, and even "natural," removing any possibility that humans might make choices for themselves or their societies about which technologies to create and use.  For example, the history of transportation is often depicted as a straight-line progression from human-powered transport (walking) to animal-powered transport (horses, carriages), to steam-powered transport (steamships, trains) and finally to transport powered by fossil fuel internal combustion engines (automobiles, airplanes) -- each stage allowing faster and farther conveyance.  But focusing only on technology in isolation ignores the many factors and decisions about urban and rural development, energy and resource production, pollution and public health, and economic subsidy and regulation that accompany the success or failure of any new innovation in the marketplace.  Are there ways that we still assume that today's latest technology will inevitably and productively improve over time, seemingly disconnected from individual or societal choices?  

  • Techological Utopianism.  This term is meant to indicate that we often try to develop new technology in order to address vexing social and cultural problems, in the hope that technology can provide an automatic, universal, and objective solution to longstanding issues rooted in conflicting human behaviors or beliefs.  For example, in the late 19th century, proponents of the new communication technologies of the telegraph and the telephone argued that instantaneous electrical communication across the globe would put an end to misunderstanding, conflict, and war between different societies.   In the mid 20th century, proponents of nuclear energy argued that electrical power "too cheap to meter" would cause an end to poverty, hunger, and labor strife.  And even as early as the 21st century, advocates of the first social media tools and platforms (or what was then called "Web 2.0") declared that the ability of individuals to post and publish their ideas online would automatically lead to a resurgence in democratic participation and cross-cultural understanding.   Are there ways that today we still assume that a new technology will provide an automatic and permanent utopian "technological fix" our longstanding social, political, economic, and cultural challenges?

Videos linking information technology to the future of work

The following four videos each imagine a future for the technological workplace, at different points in history over the past century.  Please watch all four videos as our lecture experience for this week.

I would encourage you to think about a few different questions as you view each of these videos:

  • In each video, how is new technology supposed to change the way people work?
     
  • What values or norms about work (and who is supposed to be doing that work) are being expressed (overtly or implicitly) by these films?  For example, you might think about the "gendered division of labor" represented in these videos ... are women doing one kind of work, and men doing another?  Which people working in these videos seem to have college educations?  Are people of color present and represented in these videos?
     
  • What continuities do you see between these videos, despite the time gap between them?  And what are the biggest differences?
     
  • Finally, how does each video serve as an example of either technological determinism or technological utopianism?  How might you argue against the deterministic or utopian assumptions in these videos? 

We'll watch and discuss these videos live in lecture.  You should also feel free to discuss these videos -- and your ideas about those questions -- in our all-class discussion (General INTER-LS 215 course questions and lecture comments) or in your section-specific discussion for this week (Discussions).

 

1950 Remington-Rand UNIVAC I

“UNIVAC is one of the earliest commercial computers and was easily the most famous computer of the 1950s. This film, produced between 1950 and 1952, shows how the UNIVAC computer was used in business, defense and by the census. The film shows several of the important portions of the UNIVAC system at work, including the high-speed printer, the UNISERVO tape drive, the UNITYPER, card readers and the mercury delay line tanks that served as main memory. The programming process is fully discussed and a business problem is demonstrated. These films served a promotional film as well as a way to demystify computers to the average person.” [Computer History Museum]

1968 SRI Augmentation of Human Intellect "Mother of all Demos"

 “‘The Mother of All Demos’ is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968.  The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos]

1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator

“Apple produced several concept videos showcasing the idea. All of them featured a tablet style computer with numerous advanced capabilities, including an excellent text-to-speech system with no hint of "computerese", a gesture based interface resembling the multi-touch interface later used on the iPhone and an equally powerful speech understanding system, allowing the user to converse with the system via an animated "butler" as the software agent.  In one vignette a university professor returns home and turns on his computer, in the form of a tablet the size of a large-format book. The agent is a bow-tie wearing butler who appears on the screen and informs him that he has several calls waiting. He ignores most of these, from his mother, and instead uses the system to compile data for a talk on deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest. While he is doing this, the computer informs him that a colleague is calling, and they then exchange data through their machines while holding a video based conversation.  In another such video, a young student uses a smaller handheld version of the system to prompt him while he gives a class presentation on volcanoes, eventually sending a movie of an exploding volcano to the video "blackboard". In a final installment a user scans in a newspaper by placing it on the screen of the full-sized version, and then has it help him learn to read by listening to him read the scanned results, and prompting when he pauses.”  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator]

 

2018 Microsoft vision of the future of productivity

(I'll just present this one without context, since it is so recent, but think of it in light of our COVID-19 work-at-home situation ...)

2020 Apple vision of home-based work

Finally, one more from just this past summer: A second video from Apple illustrating (a bit humorously) a vision of work at home during a pandemic crisis.