Ideology and Technology
There is a temptation among today’s hi-tech advocates to regard information technology as inherently free from ideology. Information technology, the argument goes, is just a tool, and how it is used should be the determining factor in whether or not it transmits values or power structures.
This view gives us a certain casual confidence in interrogating a new piece of software, a new website, a new whatever, if it comes along and falls outside of our techno-cultural norms. We are quick to find shortcomings to this kind of technology. We say it is fundamentally flawed, lacking some features that are paradigmatically essential, or presenting features that are irrelevant to our computing needs. ‘I don’t see how this is an improvement,’ we ultimately conclude before asking the rhetorical, ‘how does this make the technological environment better?’
The decidedly post-modern question that is always taken for granted here is “better for who?’”
Lately there has been a lot of the aforementioned kind of buzz and backlash against uses of technology that attempt to cater to users of specific gender and culture on the internet. I do not want to become mired in a stance on the issue of whether or not such catered designs are good or bad. I want only to use the debate they have created as a way of considering the underlying values of use and user that are attached to any kind of information technology, and are never entirely free from exclusion.
One of the mostly predictable forms of argument mustered against such technology is a “segregation” approach consisting of, “Why do these people need a technology catered to them? Are they considered incapable of using the existing (infallible) technology?” This kind of argument covertly ignores the role of the technology in its portrayal of reality, instead placing the “blame” on exploitative developers who would dare to warp a neutral technology along lines of ethnicity or gender. At the same time, it implies that anyone who would use, even benefit from, this kind of tech are simply ignorant of what “good” technology is. The possibility that paradigms of existing technology do not adequately address needs of culture or gender is marginalized, by a fervour of objectivity championed by a user base whose concerns of gender, ethnicity and class are already accommodated. In such a marginalized state, potential issues of gender, ethnicity or class that conflict with existing technology are either silenced or portrayed as matters that can be “simply” resolved by appropriate user conditioning.
Another common kind of argument runs something like “existing technology could easily be repurposed to do what this new technology does - there is no need to reinvent the wheel,” or “if the developers had taken such and such approach, I might not think this such a bad idea.” Wrapping itself in an idealistic shroud that says such concerns would be best addressed by modifying existing technologies for all users, these kinds of statements reduce challenges to the technological status quo to issues of incorrectly used or otherwise misunderstood APIs; essentially, the current technology is fine, it just isn’t being utilized correctly by those who want to take an alternative approach. This argument has the interesting effect of ideologically positioning the technologically-privileged user base as the universal authority on how possible issues of marginalization are best resolved: the conditions of “acceptable” paradigm change are dictated back to the challengers, defanged: “We understand your problems or the issues you are trying to confront, but the best way to deal with them is to take this existing form we have come up with and modify it.”
None of this is to say that these kinds of arguments are invalidated by their ideology, or that the presence of such ideologies in information technology is a necessarily damaging thing: there are certainly examples and situations where such criticisms may be entirely valid. My point is to simply observe that information technology is not inherently value-free, and that the tendency for those immersed in it to assume otherwise may handicap progress towards the ideal of truly “open” information.
