Openings into the Ecology of Information Technology
Continued
Framing
Key Relations
LEVEL ONE: THE IMMEDIATE MATERIAL IMPACTS
OF IT Chips
Energy
LEVEL TWO: THE RELATIONAL IMPACTS OF
IT Production Physiologies
LEVEL THREEL THE IMMATERIAL IMPACTS OF IT
Designing Semio-cultures
From Analysis to Action
Level Two: The Relational Impacts of IT
Our focus now shifts to some concerns with IT and work, particularly IT's
implications in new infrastructural systems.
We have seen that IT depends upon the mobilisation of material forces and products, as well as having impacts in its own rights. Turning our attention to the contemporary product world, IT reappears in a different guise - deeply embedded in the designed processes of production technologies. This means that the impacts of IT have to be understood in the domains of 'the technology' and as elemental to a much larger infrastructure, which again is not just technological.
Production
Consider, for example, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), which have
increasingly come to be fed by data coming from stock control and movement
within the distribution system and, more dramatically, from feedback from
points of retail sale. This feedback data indicates what product models,
in which colours and in what volume, are selling. Such information is
constantly arriving from direct automated processes - in this respect
designed forms are becoming directed and managed by raw data. The same
observation applies to the application of 'just-in-time' methods of inventory
management within the supply chain, be it, of materials and components
within the production process or of stock control. In such a setting IT
evidences both increased and diminished control.
The increased control only occurs within the system which is facilitating economic means of production and distribution. As this system becomes ever more technological (irrespective of the rise of a technical mangerialist rhetoric of control) the ability to follow directions other than those inscribed by 'the system' becomes progressively reduced - thus diminished control. Given that the nature of this system (even when 'greened') is predicated upon constant material expansion, the result is an ever increasing rise in 'whole-of-life' impacts - this is to say that the unsustainable is a structural feature of the technology which IT serves.
While IT is deeply implicated in supporting this high impact technology, this is obviously not what gives it profile as a driver of a new economy and work culture. E-commerce, e-trade, e-tailing, e-banking and so on have all arrived on the back of a new skill base, a web-based operational infrastructure, networks systems, a software industry, a computer industry, an interface design industry, telecommunication and information management systems and more. These do not functon outside of the materiality of the 'old economy' but stand on its back, fuelling both material and the immaterial impacts.
IT products and services speed the growth of the IT commodity sphere itself. In the USA output of computer equipment and peripherals is now sixteen times what it was in 1992; while electronic components production is twenty-one times what it was in 1992.16 We have already seen how the inter-related IT industry sectors of communications equipment, computers/peripherals, electronic components and semi-conductors are surging ahead. It follows that all impacts of all kinds are increased by this global and globalising dynamic. Additionally, as IT increasingly facilitates more commerce and merges with existing communications media it speeds expenditure and acquisition. Thus IT acts to generally add to the quantitative expansion of the material impacts of manufactured goods, by assisting the creation of the conditions that increase the volume of the production, consumption and waste.
IT continues to have impacts that are far harder to quantify. It has altered workplace design, but more significantly IT is creating new workstyles and work habits which are transforming workplace cultures - with major consequences for the formation and viability of social ecologies. This complex development begs more explorative research, especially in order to better understand ways in which 'the world' and 'the social' are increasingly becoming mediated by techno-cultural mechanisms that change the proximity of humans to each other and their environments. Notwithstanding the claims and promises of the likes of 'virtual communities', the more mediation, the more the medium is the message, the more the actual material basis of community becomes inoperable and the more a system of belief becomes faith in technology. In such a setting, a divide increasingly widens between the technological ability to communicate and any confirmed multi-dimensional actual act of communication (the alternative argument here is that communication is itself being redefined as a mere transfer of information - having a disposition towards communication as recognition, empathy, understanding which transcends the actual form and content of the apparently communicated thus heads towards redundancy). The more life is lived via a screen of techno-cultural mediations, the more that sentient life becomes out of touch with what shapes (designs) it. In an age where cybernetics appear to rule the most basic feedback mechanisms of human being, a hand in contact with its world, is rendered of diminishing significance.
Physiologies
In contrast to the amorphous problem and unnerving uncertainty of confronting
IT, ecology and mind, the most immediate physical designing of IT is beginning
to be acknowledged.
Globally there has been a rapid growth of sedentary culture. Physically, IT is inactive. Not only is it chairbound but for millions of users it also backgrounds 'the body'. This is not simply a matter of forgetting, but a more profound ignoring. The signs are bad. Obesity (which is not just an IT created problem but one in which the technology plays a major role) has clear connections to unsustainable habits being designed in the techno-sphere of IT, especially in the young.17 Overlooking the needs of the body and failing to reads signs of its deterioration (as they do not appear in the screen to view) is perhaps able to be confronted as a programming problems (of both machine and mind) - the demands of the body have to be made to be heard. Having said this, the body needs to be returned to the ecological, and recognised as no more than a nodal point. The notion of ecologies of mind has been used to give one sense of this. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's evocative term 'flesh of the world' gives a critical other one.
Our view of ourselves as individuated is illusory - we are connected, we are permeable, we are flow. We do not survive unless things of the world pass into and through us. We share the same air, we stand on the same soil, but above all we are unable, from the moment we are born, to exist without others. We are thus of a material, mental and social ecology.
Level Three: The Immaterial Impacts of Information
Technology
From the dominant literature and vast output of the IT magazine industry
we can all recognise that the technology rests on a massive, ongoing and
complex design effort - this by multiple design practices delivering hardware,
software and interfaces. A far less familiar and more complex picture
emerges when we starts to consider what IT itself designs.
IT designing
To begin to grasp the implication of this, a theoretical qualification
is needed. This is based on the proposition that while we design things,
these things act back upon us and in turn design much of what we are and
do. So while we are inducted into the view that design results in an end
point, be it a product, building or image, the actuality is that while
designing functions through a process ('the design process') whatever
is designed always remains in process. Understanding design in this way
places it inside the philosophical tradition of ontology - what we in
fact naming is 'ontological design'.18
The whole question of ontological design opens up many issues linked to how we humans view ourselves, our worlds, things, thinking, actions and futures. The importance of ontological design can only be registered here, a fuller exploration being beyond the task at hand. Specifically, the idea of ontological design informs the exploration of 'what IT designs'. Another way of stating this is that IT needs to be fully grasped as a design agency in its own right. This designing is perhaps the most significant and under-recognised aspect of the relation between its material and immaterial impacts.
Metaphysics, semio-cultures and psychologies
Our starting point in considering the overdetermining of the material
by the immaterial that is at the centre of the ontological designing of
IT can be understood in terms of what Gregory Bateson (a pioneer of thinker
of post-biological ecology) called an 'ecology of mind'.
Bateson recognised that human beings live as much in a world of ideas, information and meaning as they do in a world of matter. This was not an unique philosophical insight. What was new was his understanding of this as an essential ecology that connected behaviour across varied 'systems'.19 We can in part see what he was getting at by considering at the most general level how the move from oral to written culture not only changed how people communicated, their cultures and economies but how the world became documented as more and more 'information' about it was gathered.20 Viewing the world and its things via abstracted forms dramatically altered how it was constituted as a resource, as space to conquer and as an object of inquiry. All of this shifted how the world was treated. The more 'the world' becomes a product of mediation, the more that becomes known about the operation of function, the less is known about that which is not amenable to the codifications of forms of mediation. It is into this setting of gain and loss that IT arrived.
By implication we have already acknowledged problems of proximity, i.e., the closeness or not (which does not reduce just to physical distance) of human beings to the worlds of their being. Speaking, writing, drawing, thinking and touching, while all of particular worlds are also mediations through which perceptions of worlds are formed - hence the relation between ecologies of mind and matter. Despite the takne-for-granted idea of the 'evolution' of human societies, as we human beings have gained more and more knowledge about the world, the world itself has receded further and further away from us. We could express this point in quite a different way by saying while we constitute life in the world as 'the natural' we have ever moved further away from our 'naturalness' into an alienation from 'nature'and towards the artificial/synthetic condition. Thus while we dwell in 'the world', the world of our immediate dwelling is a constructed artificiality - we recoil from being animals, we eat only what we cultivate and cook, we shelter in what we build, we move by transportation means of our invention. Now, in an age where cybernetics appear to rule, the most basic feedback mechanism of human being, a hand in contact with its world, is of diminishing significance.
Measurement and calculation have displaced the embodied knowing of informed practice and intuition that once guided the exercise of skill. IT has accelerated the removal of the hand from the world - writing, drawing and making increasingly are tasks done by software facilitated machines.At the same time, our being is becoming an extension of managed appearances, images and aesthetics. While perhaps all sounding very abstract, were are 'in reality' experiencing a deepening of human being dwelling in a world of signs manufactured by a technology and of a techno-cultural essence (the real is not what is represented, rather representation, in the information economy, authors reality). A good deal of the McLuhan-influenced writings of frequently derided French media sociologist Jean Baudrillard are now reading as accounts of, rather than speculations about, the power of the image.21
Maybe all of this sounds far removed from the everyday nature of IT. It is not.
Confirmation can be found in the concern to 'sculpt' or dress one's body to correspond to an ideal age, gender and physical type. It can also be found in the idea of 'lifestyle' as the desired norm. For, despite the proliferation of appearances of difference, lifestyle as projected image has becomes normative. The idealised job, garden, night out, meal, wedding, holiday are all more of a myriad of increasingly IT delivered 'packages' that fold into a constant trend for the world as screen to conceal the world as process.
What this adds up to is a restructuring of our ecology of mind, profoundly altering how we think and what we think with. This is why the term 'metaphysics' is evoked. Disembodied thought, the negation of thought by and towards technology, the transfer of memory to machine are the ground on which new cultures and psychologies are being formed. What the mind is, knows and does; how the mind functions; feelings and emotional frameworks; the relation between mind and body; and, the very notion of mental health are all undergoing a radical change. This is not new. Industrial society has had enormous impacts upon mind and bodies, however, the speed of change and the generational disjunctures are unprecedented. All of these remarks proclaim three things: thinking as we understand it is in danger (which is to say what we are is in danger); an enormous amount of research needs to be done to understand what is actually going on - for all the emergent capabilities of IT, like so many contemporary technologies, it is an entity we use at will but with a very limited sense of its consequences to bodies, minds, cultures and ecologies. The lack of concern (care) about this situation is what threatens most, as well as evidencing the vast critically under explored designing power of IT.
From Analysis to Action
The final question to pose in the agenda of this explorative and generative
essay is: how can responsibilities for what IT designs be created? An
immediate answer to this question is not available, but it is clear that
it will be partial and plural rather than singular. This prompts the ending
of this account with an opening into an agenda of future action and thought.
Confronting the materiality of the IT techno-sphere demands a major investment in the likes of 'technological environmental management systems (TEMS),' which need measures such as 'impact visibility', 'demand reduction' and 'responsible applications' at their core. An agenda of responsibility could consider, for example, the need for greater levels of sustainment to trigger more overt demands on software designers to design forms of user and material care into a whole range of interfaces with platforms and programs - unseen background and material impacts need to be made into objects of unavoidable confrontation, negotiation and choice. Likewise, users can be better educated by the development of a 'richer and more critical' information ecology in which IT products are located - this is to say educational content needs to arrive in multiple forms across the entire geography of the informational domain. Government, corporate and NGO policy can also be formulated in areas like: occupational health and safety; facilities management; education and training; and materials, products and services procurement - every one of these areas can extend the agenda of sustainment.
IT Manufacturers can also be made to extend their responsibility - one example could be for an IT manufacturer forming a far closer relation to renewable energy technologies to power both the production and use of the product. At the same time it could be part of the pressure on that industry itself to reduce the impacts of its material ecology - its expansion could be made conditional on material limits and on the support of renewable energy take-up and radical impact reduction measures. Electronic waste could equally be confronted, for example by using IT's capabilities to systemically inscribe producer responsibility via electronic lifetime product tracking systems. The economics of the IT sphere could also be modified to reduce the whole industry momentum of performance-led 'built in redundancy' and 'designed in obsolescence'. The constant displacement of hardware and software by rapid updating of performance, style and programs needs to be countered by a new 'product ethic' of e.g., conservation.
However, in the emergent sign/image powered cultures of the age what is needed more than anything else is for the image of the relational impacts of IT to be confronted and engaged as an ontological designing - this implies the beginning of a new kind of information culture in which response-ability and sustain-ability meet in the frame of new desires.
Endnotes for Part Two
16 Figures based on Federal Reserve Boards's
monthly industrial production survey, compiled by Cahners Business Information
and published as 'Industrial Production Analysis and Forecast', Electronic
Business 18 October 2000: www.eb.mag.com. Back to Body
Text
17 Rates of obesity are on the increase in the developed world, e.g., the UK, the USA and Japan. In the UK obesity has trebled, one in five adults now obese and 60% of adults overweight; rates are similar in the USA, where one fifth of children are now classified as obese. While researchers may disagree over the clinical definition of obesity and have different views on its treatment, they are in agreement on: its adverse effects on health, particularly cardio-vascular disease; the fact that increasing numbers of people, particularly children are becoming overweight and obese; and that decrease in physical activity is a major contributing factor. The health implications of designed lifeworlds, including IT and televisual culture are well-recognised, researchers referring to 'endemic inactivity' and 'obesogenic culture'. For example see information at www.aso.org.uk , the website of UK-based Association for the Study of Obesity. Back to Body Text
18 This is one of the key underpinning ideas of the EcoDesign Foundation. It was first explored in some detail in Tony Fry Remakings: Ecology, Design, Philosphy Sydney: Envirobook, 1994. To think about design in the ontological frame is to acknowledge that it 'is' in a particular way, it has a mode of being. The nature of this being is that it always changes the nature of other things (material and immaterial) in being. Change here covers everything from substantial material transformations to a shift in perception — which itself can have the ability to completely alter what something is thought to be, how it is valued, or not, and how it is treated. The other crucial thing to emphasise is that the way change is understood is always as agency in a field of affects. This means that change, like design, fuels means-in-process rather ends-in-stasis. Any particular change is thus generative of others, although the dynamics here can be dramatically different. We tend, inappropriately, to employ human centred experiential reference points to view change — there is a way that we cannot normally think change outside of visuality. If it occurs really quickly, in say millionths of seconds, 'we' can only register it via instrumentation and so by abstractions. In this context, we just cannot see it, and so cannot think it (while accepting it occurred). At the other extreme if change is very slow, in say the ultra-extended time of multi-millions of years, it is equally placed out of sight, that is outside of seeing. However, as the ancients of the East and West well knew, there is nothing that does not change with time. The rhetoric that expressed this recognition was that 'everything flows'. Back to Body Text
19 Gregory Bateson Steps to an and Ecology of Mind London: Paladin, 1973. Back to Body Text
20 Marshall McLuhan's Guttenberg Galexy Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, still remains one of the most interesting accounts of this cultural change. Back to Body Text
21 See for example Jean Baudrillard For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (trans Charles Levin) St Louis: Telos Press, 1981, and The Ecstasy of Communication (trans Bernard and Caroline Schutze) New York: Semiotext(e) 1987. Back to Body Text