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January 7, 2004
NYT’s inability to grasp the impact of technology
I try to avoid reading most of the NYT's editorial page when at all possible, but occasionally I slip up when I'm on the hunt for a Safire or Brooks column--and regret it. Even when their are useful points made, the tone tends to be off, as in Take the leading graph:
Americans are smitten by the idea that new technologies will revolutionize life as we know it and greatly expand human potential. This was true of the inventor Thomas Edison, who predicted in the 1920's that the motion picture camera would transform public schooling and might even replace textbooks. An early broadcasting executive, Margaret Cuthbert, made a similar leap when she envisioned radio as "a great national headquarters for women," which would elevate housewives everywhere through high-minded programming like lectures and university courses. Instead of edifying housewives, however, radio gave them long-running melodramas that were dubbed soap operas because they entertained while selling laundry detergent.
The hypothesis: technology hasn't revolutionized life as we know it and hasn't greatly expanded human potential. The proof: Thomas Edison thought the motion picture camera would revolutionize education but he was wrong. Come on. Never mind that motion picture cameras and the TV cameras that followed them have revolutionized many, many other aspects of life as we know it and has greatly expanded human potential in innumerable ways. And by the way, is it a shortcoming of the technology (and its inventors) that video technology hasn't revolutionized education, or is it a shortcoming of the education establishment, which happens to be one of the least innovative industries of the last century? Edison knew his technology, he perhaps didn't understand what would become of the education industry.
The point about radio is equally silly. Would you rather be a woman before or after the radio was invented? Women have done fairly well, despite the arduous challenge of having to contend with soap operas, and technology deserves a fair amount of credit. (By the way, those hucksters selling soap enabled those programs to be enjoyed for free. And oh, housewives--and husbands--actually do benefit from buying laundry detergent--it's much preferable than the alternative. Thanks to innovation and profit motive, the invention and selling of laundry detergent greatly reduced the amount of time it took to clean clothes.) Housewives have especially benefited from technologies, such as vacuum cleaners, dishwashing and laundry machines, refrigerators, electric ovens and the like that have cut the time needed to clean a house and prepare a meal down to a fraction of what it once was--while radio programs (and the TVs that followed) perhaps made their days cleaning the house alone more enjoyable while the soap they sold freed up even more time.
I'm also bothered by the next graph:
The story of technology is the story of noble aspirations overtaken by a hard-core huckster reality. This process is on vivid display in the debate about electronic junk mail, which makes up more than half of all the e-mail that travels on the Internet. The communications breakthrough that was supposed to link people and information in revolutionary new ways is turning into a forum for digital detritus that pushes Viagra, pornography and penile enhancements.Now I'm not fan of spam and I've written that I think there are real structural problems with email--and it is no wonder that most kids don't even use it (using IM instead.) But please. If email is a "forum for digital detritus" then why can't many of us live without it? There are certainly costs to using email--but spam is not even the biggest. One needs a device (often a PC) and Internet access, for starters. These cost time and money. Spam unfortunately adds to the process cost of using email, but who among us can't hit the delete key?
There are many over-inflated claims about the potential of technology, but the truth has been that the impact of technology over the long term has more often than not exceeded our expectations, even wildest dreams, rather than falling short. Such myopia is unfortunate from a newspaper that's been around to cover the fantastic impact that innovation has had on the human condition--but fortunately it is not a myopia that most Americans are afflicted with, for the first line his piece is probably true: "Americans are smitten by the idea that new technologies will revolutionize life as we know it and greatly expand human potential." Smitten with good reason.
I have to comment on your rather facile comments about housework, technology and women. What you need is to contextualize your analysis a slight bit more, rather than making some off the cuff and overly-simplified mention of technology making women's (you are talking exclusively about 'housewives' if I am not mistaken) lives 'better'. Here is an excerpt from a discussion about a book that makes almost the opposite argument from your comments. I am quoting it in full because it is very interesting and complex in detail:
Ruth Schwartz Cowan:" More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave".
First of all, Mr. Keel, how did you know I would like this article?
-Cowan discusses the implications technology has had on women both in the home and in the workforce outside of the home.
-First of all, she argues that due to expansions in welfare, paid domestic labor has decreased. Due to the general expansion of the economy, commercial services such as food, milk or clean laundry delivery services have disappeared, with those remaining being quite costly. So now women are left to do housework without the aid of these servants/services. On top of that, the creation of electric appliances has reduced the amount of work children and husbands do around the house. Instead of men taking out the garbage, they let the wife dump the trash down the garbage disposal when she is doing the dishes. And the dishwasher seems to have eliminated any help a woman may receive from her husband and children in doing the dishes. So now the woman is left with even less help. So although electric appliances may make household jobs easier, they are still no less time consuming because whatever help a woman had before appliances has been eliminated.
-Secondly, she discusses the functionalist interpretation of the recent history of the family. It says that the beginning of industrialization caused households to become deprived of their essential productive roles in the economy (for example, people make clothes in a factory now instead of making them at home to sell later), hence women became deprived of their essential productive functions (making dresses). One solution for women to gain back a sense of their function in society would be for them to seek a new function in the workplace outside of home. Contrary belief, however, feels that a woman should now instead devote her time to raising her children and to tension management (what a lame word, which in essence means taking care of household chores so that the husband and children do not have to suffer the stresses of doing it themselves). So instead of redefining a woman's function in society to outside of the home, technology has only moved it to another facet inside of the home. A second solution would be to create a new ideology in which women's functions are not confined to the home. In this situation, a woman would not have to go through this "role anxiety". This, of course, is a better solution. Cowan goes on to say that industrialization was a participant in the "backward search for femininity". Because some of women's roles in the household were being replaced by technology, women were searching for new ways of being a woman (which still meant "finding themselves" within the home). Because a woman's function was now directed towards raising children, couples began having more children, hence the baby boom. Women also began to return to the "fruitful" and "productive" ways of before industrialization. They began knitting, crocheting, baking and growing vegetable gardens.
-Some theories suggest that appliances are what caused women to go to the workforce outside of the home. They now had free time on their hands since their jobs were made easier. For example, the washing machine cleans clothes much faster than a washtub did. Cowan disagrees with these theories, however. As stated earlier, time was not always reduced by household appliances. Also, housewives began to enter the labor market outside of the home before modern household technologies were widely used. Thirdly, she claims that housewives who were entering the workforce outside of the home were the ones who did not have and could not afford these amenities. So technology is not a cause of women entering the workforce outside of home but rather it is a catalyst. It did not free them into the workforce outside of the home but rather allowed them to work and still maintain a decent home. Women, for whatever reason, wanted or needed employment and saw that amenities could allow them to work outside of the home without endangering the living standards of their family. Wives could come home from work tired, and still prepare a decent dinner (thanks to frozen dinners) and do a load of laundry so that their children and husband would have clean clothes to wear the next day.
-Cowan states that technological systems which dominate our households, and which households are built around (things like water, gas, sewers), were built with the assumption that somebody would be around to operate them, and that somebody just happens to be the wife. She goes on to say that since utility companies operate twenty four hours a day, this is evidence that society believes households should function around the clock. She also states that if householders had intended to pay women for the work that they did inside of the home, then appliances such as washing machines would not have been preferred over laundry delivery services.
-Cowan sums up by saying that the technology itself is not at fault. The daily lives that are shaped by the use of durable goods and household amenities are much more comfortable, so society is not bound to give them up. She believes, however, that the wife does not need to succumb entirely to the work processes which they involve. We need to fix this problem by "neutralizing both the sexual connateness of washing machines and vacuum cleaners and the senseless tyranny of spotless shirts and immaculate floors", not by returning to the ways of the "old days" or by destroying the technological systems which have evolved.
Hardly facile or off-the-cuff: I've thought and read a fair amount about this and frankly I think interpretations such as the one you cite above are just way off the mark, and actually quite silly. You have to go through a fair amount of mental gymnastics to claim that technology has had the adverse effect on women in the home Cowan suggests. Perhaps women are more miserable today than they were when cleaning a house and cooking a meal required 10 hours of back breaking labor, but I doubt it and it's certainly not what the polls show. I find this implicit romatisism of what life was like before the innovations of the 20th century to be fairly ignorant.
But Cowen in the end doesn't think that we should turn back the clock and destroy technological systems, which is essentially acknowledging that the problem isn't the technology, which she admits brings comfort. Her problem seems to be how we have responded to the conveniences brought by technology, not with the conveniences themselves. That seems to be another topic all together.
Yes, I was talking about "housewives" because that was the subject of the NYT quote.
Chris (deliberately?) misses the point of the New York Times article, surely? While it was badly expressed, the writer obviously meant that new technologies transform life in ways that are difficult to anticipate, and which in America at least are often frankly commercial.
Dismissing the benefits bestowed by technological inovation on our society as "a hard-core huckster reality" is moronic, and if I may say unbecoming for someone such as yourself who's dedicated the past decade on covering innovation to agree with that sentiment. You always fail to understand that "commercial" is not a dirty world.
I am all for commercialism. I even think it tends to be the driving force behind those innovations that touch the largest number of people. You're right: I have championed it for a decade. But I don't think commcercialism can be the only source of innovation; and I don't think it can be the highest and only end of life; and I certainly don't believe that markets can be the highest expression of a people's democratic will.
Word. . .Props for Jason. . .my sentiments exactly