From: "Hacking Away at the Counter-culture"
The critical habit of finding
unrelieved domination everywhere has certain
consequences, one of which is to create a siege
mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness, and
despair that such critiques set out to oppose in the
first place. What follows is a politics that can speak
only from a victim's position. And when knowledge
about surveillance is presented as systematic and
infallible, self-censoring is sure to follow. In the
psychosocial climate of fear and phobia aroused by the
virus scare, there is a responsibility not to be
alarmist or to be scared, especially when, as I have
argued, such moments are profitably seized upon by the
sponsors of control technology. In short, the picture
of a seamlessly panoptical network of surveillance may
be the result of a rather undemocratic, not to mention
unsocialistic, way of thinking, predicated upon the
recognition of people solely as victims. It is
redolent of the old sociological models of mass society
and mass culture, which cast the majority of society as
passive and lobotomized in the face of the cultural
patterns of modernization. To emphasize, as Robins and
Webster and others have done, the power of the new
technologies to despotically transform the "rhythm,
texture, and experience" of everyday life, and meet
with no resistance in doing so, is not only to cleave,
finally, to an epistemology of technological
determinism, but also to dismiss the capacity of people
to make their own uses of new technologies.
. . .
Another reason for the involvement of cultural
critics in the technology debates has to do with our
special critical knowledge of the way in which cultural
meanings are produced--our knowledge about the politics
of consumption and what is often called the politics of
representation. This is the knowledge which
demonstrates that there are limits to the capacity of
productive forces to shape and determine consciousness.
It is a knowledge that insists on the ideological or
interpretive dimension of technology as a culture which
can and must be used and consumed in a variety of ways
that are not reducible to the intentions of any single
source or producer, and whose meanings cannot simply be
read off as evidence of faultless social reproduction.
It is a knowledge, in short, which refuses to add to
the "hard domination" picture of disenfranchised
individuals watched over by some by some scheming
panoptical intelligence. Far from being understood
solely as the concrete hardware of electronically
sophisticated objects, technology must be seen as a
lived, interpretive practice for people in their
everyday lives. To redefine the shape and form of that
practice is to help create the need for new kinds of
hardware and software.
Source:
Postmodern Culture