Abstract
Chapter 3 “Technology and Alienation” explores the downsides and potential alienating effects of immersion in a high-tech world, as well as possibilities for dis-alienation and empowerment. The develo** countries are currently undergoing a perhaps unprecedented technological revolution that has given new credence and life to the concept of alienation after a period of relative decline in which Marxian, existentialist, and other modern discourses were replaced with postmodern perspectives skeptical or critical of the concept of alienation. In this paper, I want to suggest that digital information and communication technologies and the restructuring of global capitalism require us to rethink the problematics of technology and alienation. If it is true that we are undergoing a Great Transformation, one of the epochal shifts within the history of capitalism, that digital technologies and social media are taking us into a novel field of cultural experience, and that the very nature of human identity and social relations are changing, then obviously we need to develop fresh theories to analyze these changes and politics to respond to them
“Human beings make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing”. Karl Marx
“They who control the Microscopick, control the World”. Thomas Pynchon
For discussions of an earlier version of this chapter and suggestions for revision I would like to thank Lauren Langman and Richard Kahn. This article was first published as
“New Technologies and Alienation: Some Critical Reflections,”The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium, edited by Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, p. 47–68. It has been revised and updated for this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
Postmodern theories claim that we are undergoing dramatic changes and mutations in the transition from modernity to postmodernity (see Baudrillard 1993 [1976]; Jameson 1984, 1991; Harvey 1989 and the discussions in Best and Kellner 1991, 1997, 2001). Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) argues that information and communication technologies are creating a novel form of the global economy and networked society.
- 2.
On the various stages of development of the Frankfurt School, see Kellner 1989a and for reflections on the roles of emergent technologies in the current stage of capitalist development see Best and Kellner 2001; Kellner 2003a.
- 3.
On the project of develo** a critical theory of technology, see Feenberg 1991, 1995, 1999, 2017; Kellner 1997; Best and Kellner 2001.
- 4.
On the various standpoints and strategies of critique of the Frankfurt School, see Kellner 1989a. Although the critical theorists are sometimes associated with a technophobic critique of technology as domination, in their best works they develop more dialectical perspectives; see Kellner 1989a.
- 5.
For a survey of social constructionist views of technology, see Philip Brey, “Social Constructivism for Philosophers of Technology: A Shopper's Guide” Scholars Library, Spring–Summer 1997 at https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v2n3n4/brey.html (accessed December 29, 2020). See also the page on “Social Construction of Technology” which notes that “SCOT developed like any normal scientific program: its agenda, central concepts, and even unit of analysis shifted in response to research findings and discussions among contributing scholars.” From: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 at https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/social-construction-of-technology (accessed January 25, 2021).
- 6.
See the dual critique of academic philosophy of technology and social science positions in Feenberg 1991, 1995, 1999, and 2017.
- 7.
Marx, for example, in his conception of a humanized world, a world more fit more human beings, included industry and technology in such a schema. On Marx and technology, see Amy_Wendling, Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation Palgrave Macmillan; 2009 is available on-line at https://dl.uswr.ac.ir/bitstream/Hannan/130465/1/Amy_Wendling_Karl_Marx_on_Technology_and_Alienation__2009.pdf {accessed on December 29, 2020). See also Mike Healy, “Alienation and information communications technology,” Semantic Scholar, 2014, on-line at https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Alienation-and-information-communicationsHealy/20e6e4ea73d98e3e3e9e1958a4ddbf09bb78d601 (accessed December 29. 2020).
- 8.
These notebooks were never published during Marx's life and their printing in 1932 caused a sensation, presenting a vigorous philosophical and humanist Marx quite different from the economic theorist and “scientific socialist” championed by the official Marxian working class movements. On the importance of the Paris Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 for the interpretation of Marxism, see Marcuse 1972 [1932], p. 3–48.
- 9.
On Smith, Marx, and the division of labor and alienation under capitalism, see Douglas Kellner, “Capitalism and Human Nature in Adam Smith and Karl Marx,” in Jesse Schwartz, ed, The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism (Santa Monica, Cal.: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1977), p. 66–86.
- 10.
Turkle (2011 and 2014) later had second thoughts about her celebration of the technoculture and published critical reflections on decades of observations of her students uses of technology and the evolving technoculture, which I discuss below.
- 11.
For documentation, see “10 Gamers Who Tragically Died Playing Videogames—YouTube” at https://www.youtube.com/watch/El7kwIpjrtQ (accessed January 14, 2021).
- 12.
When the concept of alienation began circulating in the 1950s and 1960s in Marxist, existentialist, religious, and sociological discourses, the implication was always that alienation itself is bad, that it constitutes a danger to human beings that should be overcome in the transformation to a non-alienating form of life. At the time, against this view, I believed that it was good to be alienated in some senses from the dominant society of the period, so that in the ‘50s and ‘60s when the discourse of alienation began circulating in sociological, philosophical, and even public circles, I always thought it was positive to be alienated from an other-directed, conformist, and repressive society. Consequently, when I was doing my doctoral dissertation in philosophy in the 1960s and early 1970s I argued that in some senses alienation and authenticity were equivalent, that you couldn't be an authentic self, in contemporary U.S. and advanced capitalist societies, without being alienated from it in some ways, and thus alienation from the dominant society was a necessary step in creating a new life and society—an argument I made in my 1973 Ph.D. dissertation Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity which I successfully defended in the Columbia University Philosophy department and got my Ph.D. and an academic career. I agree with Marx and Heidegger, however, that in other senses, however, alienation signifies a harmful condition that should be overcome, thus a discourse of alienation must specify whether the condition described is positive or negative and if the latter how it can be superseded.
- 13.
For documentation, see “A Community for LGBTQ + Teens” at https://www.qchatspace.org/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA9P__BRC0ARIsAEZ6iriqd666bvt6UBfFflQ3xiNe9r89lNObETimvOreUcXZGjYNpmlNaZ8aAvo6EALw_wcB (accessed January 14, 2021).
- 14.
See Kraut, et al. 1998, and the discussion of criticisms of the study in Denise Caruso, “Technology; Critics are picking apart a professor's study that linked Internet use to loneliness and depression.” The New York Times, September 14, 1998 at https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/14/business/technology-critics-are-picking-apart-professor-s-study-that-linked-internet-use.html (accessed January 25, 2021).
- 15.
Jean M. Twenge, Thomas E. Joiner, and Megan L. Rogers,2
“Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time.” Sage Journals, First Published November 14, 2017 at https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702617723376 (accessed December 29, 2020); this study contains a large bibliography of articles documenting various studies of obsessive media time and on-line behaviors, as well as depression and suicides in youth.
- 16.
As technologies and media institutions and practices evolve, possibilities for feedback and critique of media programming is possible. For example, call-in and talk radio and television, as well as electronic town meetings, can involve two-way communication and participatory democratic discussions. In the social media age, fans watched shows live and commented on and critiqued the programming. Hence, theorists like Baudrillard who argue against television and the media on the grounds that they promote only one-way, top-down communication essentialize the media and freeze the then-current forms of the media into fixed configurations, covering over the fact that media evolve and can be reconstructed, refunctioned, and transformed into more democratic modes of communication.
- 17.
I will discuss netroots, digital activism, and using social media for progressive social change in more detail in this and in following chapters.
- 18.
For a recent biography of Walter Benjamin that gives an excellent detailed account of his life and works, see Eiland and Jennings 2014. On Benjamin’s media theory, see Kang 2016.
- 19.
See Brecht’s radio theory collected in Silberman 2000, p. 41 ff.
- 20.
Social media companies also sold their data to political interests as I discuss in Chap. 6 where I document how Facebook and other social media companies sold their data to the Trump campaign, helped them with the Russians to win the election for Trump, and, in general, how various political interests use data mined from social media to direct political ads to individuals based on their user profiles. Indeed, while the Russians used this data to help elect the nefarious Trump, he has currently undergone his second impeachment as I write this in the dark days of early 2021 just after Trump’s thug army of Storm Troopers invaded and desecrated the Halls of Congress while terrorizing its members who were forced into lockdown as the marauders trashed offices, broke windows, and beat up guards in a melee in which at least five people were killed, hel** to bring the Trump era to its not unexpected implosion, and leading Trump to be permanently banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies which had fed his insatiable narcissism, mobilized his tribe of cultists, and unleashed the forces of darkness with a twitch of his Twitter finger and the widespread retweeting by his Legions of Darkness, many of which are now fugitives from the law and who face decades in prison, while Trump was impeached by Congress on January 13, 2021.
- 21.
The “digital divide” emerged early on in the 1990s as the buzzword for perceived divisions between information technology have and have nots in the U.S. economy and society. A U.S. Department of Commerce report released in July 1999 claimed that the digital divide in relation to race was dramatically escalating and the Clinton administration and media picked up on this theme (See the report “Americans in the Information Age: Falling Through the Net” at https://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/digitaldivide/ (accessed January 7, 1999). A critique of the data involved in the report emerged, claiming that it was outdated; more recent studies by Stanford University, Cheskin Research, ACNielson, and the Forester Institute claim that education and class are more significant factors than race in constructing the divide (see http:cyberatlas.internet.com/big-picture/demographics [accessed January 2, 2021] for a collection of reports and statistics on the digital divide). As I revise this chapter in Winter 2020–2021, after many schools and Universities have been put on lockdown, including mine, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and classes are being offered on-line, many students are deprived of access because they do not own computers or have digital access at home, and thus the digital divide remains an issue as important and burning than ever. Indeed, it continues to be clear that there is a ga** division between information technology haves and have nots, that this is a major challenge to develo** an egalitarian and democratic society, and that something needs to be done about the problem. My contribution involves the argument that empowering the have nots requires the dissemination of new critical digital and media literacies (see Kellner-Share 2019 and Chap. 10 below) and that access alone is not enough to empower groups and individuals previously excluded from economic opportunities and socio-political participation. Wikipedia has an increasing comprehensive page on the digital divide and another on the digital divide between various countries; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide (accessed on November 30, 2020).
- 22.
It was announced in April 1997 that Boeing Aircraft joined Bill Gates in investing in a satellite communications company, Teledesic, which plans to send up 288 small low-orbit satellites to cover most of the Americas and then the world in 2002 that could give up to 20 million people satellite Internet access at a given moment. See USA Today, April 30, 1997; in May 1998, Motorola joined the “Internet in the Sky” Project, scrap** its own $12.9 billion plan to build a satellite network capable of delivering highspeed data communications anywhere on the planet and instead joined the Teledesic project, pushing aside Boeing to become Teledesic's prime contractor (New York Times, May 22, 1998). An “Internet-in-the-Sky” would make possible access to digital technologies for groups and regions that did not even have telephones, thus expanding the potential for democratic and progressive uses of information and communications technologies; as of the present, however, such plans have failed to materialize and some are skeptical that they will, while others see wireless and satellite networks as the next stage of development. For current discussion, see the proceedings of “10th EAI International Conference, WiSATS 2019, Harbin, China, January 12–13, 2019, Proceedings, Part I,” Springer Links at https://springer.longhoe.net/book/10.1007/978-3-030-19153-5 (accessed December 12, 2020).
- 23.
While the term “sustainability” goes back to post-World War Two attempts to develop technologies appropriate to human beings and the quality of the environment, the term “sustainable development” was adopted in the Agenda 21 program of the United Nations unveiled at the 1992 Earth Summit. Critics, however, saw this concept as promoting excessive development and sought to define sustainability as “a means of configuring civilization and human activity so that society and its members are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in the present while preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystems, and planning and acting for the ability to maintain these ideals indefinitely.” See https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability (accessed December 13, 2020).
- 24.
The precautionary principle was introduced by environmentalists in the 1980s, “and is reflected in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (signed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).” The principle indicates that “even if there is scientific uncertainty regarding a risk and its consequences, preventative measures may be justified. This principle is often invoked when the consequences are considered great enough to require expensive amelioration, even when the risks are considered low.” In practice, it involves sorting out costs and benefits of introducing new technologies and deploying preventive measures to control harmful effects and consequences. See https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_Principle (accessed November 30, 2020).
- 25.
- 26.
See Cleaver 1994, the documents collected in Zapatistas 1994, and Castells 1997. The Zapatista’s continue to exist and thrive in the present, see Hilary Klein, “A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lessons of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On. What are the lessons of the EZLN's revolutionary struggle for Indigenous autonomy, a quarter-century after declaring war on Mexico and global capitalism?,” NACLA, January 18, 2019 at https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/18/spark-hope-ongoing-lessons-zapatista-revolution-25-years
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Kellner, D. (2021). Technology and Alienation. In: Technology and Democracy: Toward A Critical Theory of Digital Technologies, Technopolitics, and Technocapitalism. Medienkulturen im digitalen Zeitalter. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31790-4_3
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