Technology and Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Technology and Culture Michael Brian Schiffer (bio) Technology and Culture. By Allen W. Batteau. Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 2009. Pp. ix+148. $15.95. In this slim volume of eight chapters, cultural anthropologist Allen W. Batteau aims to develop the view that “modern technology is so completely interwoven into the texture of modern society that the mutual evolution of modern technology and modern cultural forms cannot be usefully unraveled” (p. 4). Accordingly, the book lacks tools for discerning specific relationships between technology and culture. Rather, it contains an idiosyncratic definition of technology, a hodgepodge of underdeveloped examples, and a number of musings about whether technology makes “a positive contribution to human happiness, freedom, and security” (p. 3). The work’s theoretical underpinnings are an amalgam of idealist cultural anthropology, systems theory, actor-network theory, and the social construction of technology that never solidify into a coherent framework. The villain lurking throughout is “managerial ideology” (p. 3), which promotes rationality and efficiency and treats cultural aspects of technology as irrational. Anthropology’s challenge is to reclaim “the cultural resources to tame the technology that rides mankind” (p. 71). For Batteau, a technology is a complex “large-scale, networked system” (p. 27), built according to “authoritative [written] standards” (p. 98), that represents “an extension of state and corporate power” (p. 51). Technologies are also “autonomous and possess trajectory, momentum, and agency” (p. 12). Thus, to regard mere tools or artifacts as technologies is a “misapprehension” (p. 98). Restricting the definition of technology in this way is a surprisingly un-anthropological move, one that enables Batteau to ignore the substantial literature on traditional technologies and on technological change. Not surprisingly, the author’s expertise concerns the operation of complex sociotechnical systems of the industrial West, which supplies the book’s examples. A simple admission of this understandable bias would have been preferable to a self-serving and off-putting definition of technology. [End Page 816] Although the book emphasizes the consequences of adopting complex sociotechnical systems, the causes of new technologies are said to include “technological exuberance” (p. 9), technology’s “restlessness” (p. 86), “systems builders” (p. 37), and cultural values. Sweeping conclusions about cause tend to be vacuous, such as “The joining of large-scale usefulness, collective will, and modernity created Technology as we understand it today” (p. 24). The only specific social process that Batteau invokes to explain the development of technologies is competition, mainly among nations, as in the missile race between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Batteau offers many provocative propositions about complex socio-technical systems that could stimulate classroom discussions. “The contributions of technology to security,” he claims, “are none” (p. 20). As for health and nutrition, he suggests that “further improvements . . . depend more on institutional—that is, cultural—reform than on technological advance,” and that further technological developments might “generate more infectious diseases and pollution” (p. 20). Indeed, he attends to the negative consequences and hidden costs that technologies can bring, including “massive institutional inflexibility” (p. 132) as well as “degraded working conditions, increased surveillance, or erosion of social ties” (p. 47). “A strong element of magical thinking” (p. 44), he suggests, fosters the belief that any problem can yield to a technological solution. When technologies go awry, system operators are usually blamed, but he contends that designers and managers also contribute greatly to failures. The last chapter, “Technology for Culture,” fails to deliver on the promise to create “a unified, articulated framework” for studying culture and technology (p. 125). Instead, Batteau promotes the panacea of decentralized, appropriate technologies to serve humanity. This can work, he claims, because “For every problem that technology is intended to address . . . there is a nontechnological solution, one that focuses on remaking institutions and reforming the habits of the heart” (p. 132). The remaking of institutions is to be guided not by the requirements of technology, as at present, but by widely shared “civic values” (p. 130), a curious notion that implies cultural and social homogeneity. In our heterogeneous societies, I wonder whose values will prevail, and how reformers will acquire the power to impose their solutions on others. Despite these many shortcomings, Technology and Culture...