Is technology neutral? Are we still having this conversation?

Google's homepage on January 18th

As I read Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis' 2008 Blown to Bits, I began to wonder about the question of neutrality in anything, technology included, perhaps technology in particular. The authors of this book offer an interesting overview of how the "bits" that constitute electronic information have come to constitute entire lives. From credit cards to social networking sites, from online shopping to digitized birth, death, marriage, divorce and other governmental records, our lives are coded/covered in bits of data. This reality poses a number of problems, especially in terms of privacy, but the authors repeatedly argue that the technology at work here is essentially neutral: "We offer two basic morals. The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad—it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities" (14). This claim to, if not neutrality, equality of opportunity for positive and negative outcomes seems problematic, though.


One of the examples the authors offers for parity is that of nuclear technology: such technology, they argue, can be destructive (in the from of nuclear weapons) or palliative (nuclear energy reduces our reliance on pollution causing fossil fuels). But this distillation of  nuclear energy ignores the long term consequences of the supposedly palliative results of nuclear technology. Nuclear waste destroys our environment, too. The text, though informative in many ways, seems to rely on what I would argue is an oversimplification.

Technology isn't neutral. First, technology is embedded in the ideology of those who produced it. Take Twitter: At Computers and Writing this year, I'll be arguing for some of the benefits of Twitter for expanding our notion of the classroom. But Twitter's design reveals an ideological/pedagogical bent: it privileges concision, brevity, and climax over fluidity and exposition. Twitter isn't neutral, though it certainly can be used for good or ill. Secondly, not all technology offers equal opportunity for destruction and construction. Nuclear power, as I noted above, seems like a good example the problematic nature of this claim: the possibilities offered are largely destructive even if they are simultaneously beneficial.

In addition to Blown to Bits, I spent much of this week reading Access Denied. The authors in this collection offer a complex vision of the problems created by a seemingly free internet. The perceived openness of the search engines, for example, elides hidden filters. Some filters are imposed by governments, others by corporations, including the search engines we believe to be neutrally answering our queries.  The problem, Robert Faris and Nart Villeneuve argue, is not simply the breadth of filtering orchestrated by some governments (i.e. Iran, China, and Yemen filter a large variety of websites featuring everything from pornorgraphy to discussions of human rights abuses) but also the depth of this filtering (South Korea, the authors note, chooses to filter very little; however, those sites to which the government blocks access are well blocked; those trying to access pro-North Korean sites will find it incredibly difficult to navigate around the filters). The speed and thoroughness with which dictatorships and coups shut down even electronic dissent complicates the picture of the internet as a space in which new possibilities are opened to those without a voice. Electronic voices are also easily silenced.

Though hard  to pin down, the reasons for filtering sites are largely political and/or economic. We can see this clearly in the current debate over SOPA/PIPA. Who benefits from blocking sites featuring copyrighted material? For the most part, those with a financial interest in selling content that is currently available for free. Record and Motion Picture companies support the bill; huge internet companies, like Google and Wikipedia, don't because they benefit from this content. No matter my personal feelings on the bill (and I'm against it, even though copyright infringement is certainly a problem), interested parties on both sides of the bill are driven largly by economic considerations.

Web 2.0 offers a number of opportunities for recursive, constuctive, and collaborative work. (Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, in Chapter 2 of Access Denied, offer such a description by foregrounding the work of Wikipedia.) The work of Wikipedia makes for an interesting example, especially in view of how the site has been blocked and unblocked in some countries, including China, depending on the content of certain articles of interest to the government. Why? As the authors explain, "The editors of a Wikipedia article are telling the story not just for the benefit of their neighbors in their own country, but for anyone in any place to see. The destabilization that Wikipedia makes possible is also a threat to the ability of a given state to control how its own 'brand' is perceived internationally" (30).Imagine what possibilities for construction and constraint web 3.0, perhaps characterized by shared/universal platforms or by computer produced knowledge/information or some other as yet largely unimagineable characteristic, will offer.

Largely, however, the lesson of these books is that we must pay more attention to our digital fingerprints and footprints and begin to interrogate the cost of digital conviences in terms of our privacy and the quality of the information to which we have access. The key, I think, is to pay attention to what digital conviences, including the digital archives and sites we use as academics, are costing us. The internet is not going anywhere, neither is the problem of filtering. Our best hope, then, is to approach questions of digital freedom and equinimity as thoughtfully as possible.

And to recognize that conversations about neutrality are, perhaps, best replaced by conversations about an ethics for the digital age. As Zittrain and Palfrey expalin, we must begin asking questions not about whether filtering should be happening. It is and there is little to be done, especially in countries with tight econmic and polictical countrols. We cannot "free the internet." Instead we must begin asking more nuanced questions and recognize the reality that "the future of the Internet, if not all geopolitics, hangs in the balance" in discussions of digital technology and the role of state actors (30). We must begin to discuss not "good" and "bad" filtering, but rather the slope of the "freedom curve": "If the value at issue is whether an ICT environment is relatively open or relatively closed, then the key fact is whether a state is headed toward a more open system or a more closed system" (51).