Ironies in the public response to information technology

The introduction of new technologies in the United States, even those that are widely valued, frequently confronts public skepticism, if not overt opposition. Nuclear power, chemical products, biotechnology inventions, reproductive technologies, automobile safety devices, vaccines and pharmaceuticals, and many other technologies all have been the source of prolonged disputes over their social, health, or ethical implications. But despite their profound social impact, information technologies have been largely exempt from such disputes. This article explores the way that the response to information technologies sheds light on certain values and priorities that shape the public response to new technologies in America.

NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

The economic and social benefits of information technologies--from computers to communications--hardly need explanation. And like all technologies, they also have problematic implications. But, while some people have been reluctant to adapt to these technologies, their social effects have evoked surprisingly few expressions of public concern. These technologies have, in many ways, intruded on privacy, threatened civil liberties, and imposed on many rights.

Computerized data banks empower bureaucratic authorities by providing easy access to personal information--about credit ratings, school performance, housing, medical histories, and tax status. And in the future, they will no doubt allow access to genetic profiles, providing information about our predisposition to certain diseases or behavioral conditions. Such information may be available to employers, insurers, product advertisers, banks, school systems, university tenure committees, and other institutions that exercise enormous control over our lives. Indeed, given its social impact, computerization could well be called the "cursor" of our time.

In many sectors, computers have enhanced economic efficiency, but they have also enabled the relentless extension of advertising through sophisticated distribution of mailing lists. Telephone propaganda and telemarketing solicitations shamelessly intrude on our home life, disturbing us at mealtime with automated messages that have gotten out of hand. Information technologies have displaced people from jobs and turned many potentially skilled workers into low-level computer technicians. Computers have, in many ways, facilitated the work of scholars, but they have also turned them into typists; yet, from this most articulate community, one hears hardly a complaint. They have turned the simple act of buying a plane ticket into an endless manipulation of frequent-flier mileage and optimal bargain fares, but we welcome the so-called convenience. They have encouraged new forms of crime and fraud, but we describe them with grudging admiration. They have allowed new types of vicious weaponry, but we call them "smart bombs."

Perhaps most important, information technologies have extended the power of the mass media, creating unprecedented possibilities for political manipulation and changing the very nature of political life. The media creation of politicians was obvious during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign. But, also, the use of electronic communication has reduced accountability, threatening one of the most important ways we protect democratic values. And in many other ways, information technologies limit speech, restrict exchange, and challenge First Amendment Freedoms.

Many years ago, George Orwell predicted that information technologies would bring about an era of mind-control; but the symbolic year, 1984, came and went as if his scenario were only a science fiction plot. While there have been many critiques of information technologies, they mainly come from an elite--sociologists, ethicists, and others professionally concerned about the problematic legal, social, and political implications of electronic technologies. Humanists worry about the blurring of image and reality brought about by telecommunications. Sociologists worry about the effects of these technologies on work. And educators worry that computers in the classroom may undermine the child's desire to read, reduce careful thinking to impulse shopping, and turn dynamic problem solving into predigested programs.

Such reservations, however, come mainly from scholars and specialists, and their warnings have never gained a public following. Ironically--despite their profound impact--there is nearly total absence of organized public concern about a set of technologies with highly problematic social and political implications. This lack of concern reveals, I believe, something about what matters in American society, about certain values that guide our response to science and technology. So let me try to explain the irony by examining, in greater detail, the issues at stake.

THREE TYPES OF PROBLEMS

Information technologies pose three types of problems: they intrude on personal privacy; they offer the means for institutions to control their clients; and they encourage practices that threaten certain democratic values. Let me look more closely at these issues, exploring in each case the ways in which they affect, more generally, the public response to technological change.

INTRUSION ON PERSONAL PRIVACY

First, there is the potential intrusion on individual rights--in particular, the right to privacy. In America's individualistic culture, resistance to technology is often cast in the rhetoric of rights. Animal advocates call for animal rights; anti-abortionists make claims for fetal rights; environmentalists advocate the rights of future generations; and the elderly claim the right to die. Rights talk has become the way that Americans express the fundamental and frequent tensions between individual expectations and social or community goals. Thus, even technologies intended to improve public health, such as fluoridation, universal vaccination, or the automobile air bag, all have been opposed because they intruded on the rights of individuals to make their own choices.

Rights, as defined by philosopher H.L.H. Hart, are "moral justifications for limiting the freedom of another." Thus, rights claims are inevitably a source of conflict and contradiction. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in claims to the right of privacy where those who claim the right of access to information must necessarily confront those concerned about confidentiality and the abuse of information.

Privacy in America appears to be an important value. While not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, the right to privacy is inferred from various provisions of the Bill of Rights such as the right of association and the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and against self-incrimination. Rhetorical support for the right to privacy is extremely high. In surveys reviewed in Dimensions of Tolerance by Herbert McCloskey and Alida Brill, about 76 percent of the public believe that privacy should be added to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. But, in fact, how deep is the commitment to privacy when it conflicts with other values? Other surveys, they report, suggest that most people support measures that would require psychiatrists to report to the police a patient's expressed intention to commit a crime. And attitudes towards wiretapping are equivocal; political extremists and potential enemy sympathizers are considered fair game.

In fact, many Americans seem to care little about privacy. Data snooping, helped by sophisticated software, has become a veritable industry. Spying and surveillance gimmicks have made many millionaires, but there is little public outcry. A survey by the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation in October 1992 found that most Americans believe that genomic information (probably about others, not themselves) should be available--not only to directly affected relatives but also to employers and insurers. And there is no apparent public concern about the privacy implications of the Clinton administration proposal for a universal health card, though such a card would contain the complete health history of every American in an easily accessible form.

As a society, Americans tolerate an extraordinary amount of intrusive noise. People accept Muzak in shopping malls, supermarkets, and airports. They accept televised surveillance in departments stores and other public places. Media audiences seem to relish the intrusions on personal privacy when the networks explore the sex life of public figures, and to an amazing degree, people talk about their own personal problems in public. Thus, popular magazines and media talk shows are full of lurid and embarrassing personal confessions. The remarkably popular self-help movement is characterized by a confessional mode of discourse. The confessional style of Alcoholics Anonymous has been extended to deal with smoking, gambling, and overeating, suggesting that relinquishing privacy is seen as a way to solve personal problems. Far from demanding privacy, Americans let it "all hang out." Perhaps this explains why, despite their obvious intrusion on privacy, information technologies have not been resisted.

POTENTIAL FOR SOCIAL CONTROL

The second issue at stake in the development of information technology has to do with its potential for social control. The availability of computerized data on many aspects of personal behavior has enabled a striking level of institutional control over individuals. This capability has been the source of some professional and philosophical concern, but it has not brought about significant public resistance. Computers and fax machines have been marketed as a means of empowering and liberating the individual--of expanding individual choice. Perhaps no industry has been more successful in turning the latest gimmick--the extra megabyte, the latest fax machine, call waiting, and now the videophone--into dire necessity. For the middle class who form the core of most of the social movements directed against technology, these are familiar and useful technologies that seem to give people more, not less, control.

Discriminatory abuses of computerized information, its use for surveillance or for denying insurance, have been examined in legislative debates and in investigations by such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union. But these inquiries seldom raise fundamental structural questions. While critics of other technologies often question how they are developed and diffused, those concerned about information technologies focus on particular incidents and often treat them as aberrations. And some of the abuses--for example, computer crime--are admired as creative, clever, a way to "beat the system." Though individuals, and their bank accounts, may be harmed by such abuses, the abuses seldom generate a popular outcry because consumers who are affected by the abuse of personal information are dispersed and difficult to organize. Few groups are prepared to mobilize protest. Gay activists who have organized resistance to the flagrant abuses of computerized information from HIV tests are an exception that proves the point.

Related to concerns about social control are the questions of trust that commonly underlie popular resistance to technology: Will the inevitable corporate control over technological applications sacrifice public or individual interests to the imperatives of private profit? Clearly, the computer industry was generated by commercial entrepreneurs. Yet, few seem to mind the tradeoffs between corporate efficiency and individual rights when people become digits in data bank files.

Nor do we seem to care that along with the Global Village and the Information Highway comes the risk of hegemonic control over the images and messages we receive from the media. We welcome the advances in information technology that have brought cable systems and multiple channels as "pluralism." But this pluralism, as a reporter for the Village Voice cynically suggests, may just be "code for a corporate controlled mediasphere that isolates consumers into ever narrower pigeonholes of taste and cash flow." Today there are plans for digital broadcast satellite services offering no less than 1,000 channels--truly technology out of control. Yet the most common popular response is that expressed in Bruce Springstein's song: "57 Channels and Nothing On."

THREAT TO DEMOCRATIC VALUES

A third and related problem is the threat to democratic values--an important theme in the history of technological controversies. Disagreements over power plant sites or the use of toxic substances in the workplace often have focused on the question of public control over technological decisions. Typically, opponents of a technology seek to participate in decisions that affect their interests. Challenging the authority of experts and questioning the motives of public officials, they seek to increase accountability. Thus, technical obfuscation and its limiting effect on public accountability have been important issues in the resistance to many technologies. But the highly obscure and technical language of bits and bytes, of DOS and disks, of macros and mice have simply entered the vernacular. To the middle class, the group most often engaged in social movements, information technologies appear to be decentralized, comprehensible, and controllable.

This is to ignore, however, the capacity of electronic technologies to reduce the citizen's capacity for reflective engagement in politics, to substitute digitalized responses for active participatory exchange. Thus, when the 1992 American presidential candidate, Ross Perot, proposed to revive the old and discredited idea of electronic democracy, no one, even in the contentious climate of a political campaign, tried to debate its political implications. Advocates of electronic democracy fail to see the difference between the inundation of information and reflective political exchange. And computer advocates fail to see the broader issues of manipulation and loss of political accountability as problems; to them, the technology appears to enhance individual choice.

WHY NO RESISTANCE?

Other issues generating controversies over technology have to do with affected interests, and, in particular, potential risks. But aside from occasional professional critiques and some concern about radiation exposure from computer screens, there has been no popular or organized resistance to the remarkable development and diffusion of information technologies. Indeed, they are viewed as the symbol of progress, the icon of ingenuity, and the test of American competitiveness in the economic marketplace.

In the history of technological controversies, opposition groups rely on people who offer a base of political support, and who will become part of a social movement. These have included people who are directly affected by the construction of a noxious facility in their neighborhood or by the economic implications of a technology for their livelihood. Or they have included those who share broad ideological or religious convictions. Concerns about the invasion of privacy, the potential for social control, or the threat to democratic values are vague and diffuse. These issues have no natural constituency, no organized group that will speak out in protest. Thus, these concerns are expressed less through organized protests than through the individual procedures of the courts in response to specific abuses. The legal system operates more to protect individuals than to challenge the development of the technology.

Let me conclude with a speculation about one of the most important issues underlying many technological controversies--the religious and moral implications of "tampering" with nature. Embedded in this complex issue, central to debates over biotechnology, are concerns about authenticity and about tampering with "natural" or God-given features of life. Now, information technologies present, perhaps, more of a challenge to authenticity. While not tampering with the body, they tamper with the mind, creating bizarre confusions between fact and fantasy, between the imagined and the real. What can be more intrusive than the distortion of mental images involved in the simulation of virtual reality? But this manipulation of mentality, for some reason, evokes little public dismay. The manipulation of the body for therapeutic purposes or the creation of bio-genetic mice for research purposes becomes a serious moral dilemma. While the mind, it seems, can be sacrificed for the information agenda. After all, why worry? The Bible is on line.

Dorothy Nelkin is a University Professor at New York University, teaching in the Department of Sociology and in the School of Law, and the author of Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Spring 1994
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