Technology and the Search for Meaning
Most people, when I tell them that I am a blogger, are mildly amused. However, when they discover that I am also a student of anthropology, the same question arises: is the internet, and technology in general, bringing us closer together, or assisting in alienating ourselves from the outside world? Though I am unprepared to answer such a question right now, it is one that is pertinent to the study of anthropology in the information age.
Many questions surrounding the building and maintenance of community are centered on the concept of meaning: community as either a place of meaning or a way to discover meaning. This emphasis on symbolic interpretations is central to the new scope of anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss (1967:18-20,32) defined anthropology along the lines of de Saussure’s definition of semiology: a study of the existence of social signs. The importance of the meaning of these signs — an important tenet in the span of today’s anthropological study — has helped anthropology develop into a social science where subjective observations have become a means of objective demonstration (Levi-Strauss 1967:50-52). Taking the Levi-Straussian (1967:51) stance that “if society is anthropology, anthropology is itself in society” in an increasingly technological society, perhaps the first place to discover the role of technology in creating culture is through the symbols that these same technologies represent.
Marcel Mauss, in his work on gift-giving and receiving in archaic societies, portrayed economic transactions — through the exchange of gifts — as a form of symbolic exchange (1990:7). Therefore, if even economic transactions can be taken into the symbolic realm and hold a key to the search for societal meaning, it is only clear that technology would do the same. Arnold Van Gennep’s discussion on rites of passage was an important stepping stone in the discussion of symbolic mediation within anthropology, which was in turn heavily discussed by Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Turner’s work on liminality (1967) as a period of transition and transgression is key to the understanding of how we experience technology. Within the rite of passage, the liminal phase is characterized as being in-between, as being a place of inversion, where anything can happen before reincorporation (Turner 1967:95-98). Strikingly, this is also similar to William Gibson’s description of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” (1984:51). Within Gibson’s cyberspace, the individual is separated from society and enters an alternate world where boundaries are transgressed (Gibson 1984 48-54).
What then, is the meaning that is being conveyed through new technologies? Those familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s mantra “the medium is the message” (2002:18) could possibly argue that in fact, it is these same technologies that are the meaning for which we, as users, are searching. While reports of information overload affecting our productivity pour through the news media, McLuhan’s claim that we are being inundated by the new electronic speed of literacy (2002:23) is more relevant than ever before; an echo of the hypothesis that we are finding meaning within technology — which then acts as a symbol — rather than within the outcomes of this technical use. If culture is indeed assigning roles to people instead of jobs (McLuhan 2002:25-26), then individuals within an increasingly technical culture will identify with the roles that technology provides for them and create their own social space based on this distinction. Raymond Williams asks whether society is on the path of technological determinism — where technology is accidental and the consequences follow directly from the creation of these technologies — or symptomatic technology, where while technology is still accidental, they are a symptom of change on the societal level (2002:29-30). In either case, technology lies within social structure as a creator or by-product, and therefore is influential in forging cultural meaning.
John Naisbitt is quick to say in his book on technology and meaning that we both fear and worship technology (2001:36). Langdon Winner, in his discussion on technology as an artifact, is quick to support this claim through his own assertion that technology as an artifact is political; that is, that it holds an arrangement of power (1999:33). The structural aspects of technology create an inherent way of building order, whether it be conscious and conspiratorial or not (Winner 1999:31,33-39). This statement of power is echoed by David Nye (1996) in his discussion of the geometrical sublime; skyscrapers and bridges, having been used as symbols of literal and figurative upward progress, portray power in their symbolism by offering contrasting views of the city: both from the ground looking up and demonstrating hope, and from the top looking down and demonstrating control (Nye 1996:104). Even the simple photo has elements of power: as photography does not possess a language and the camera can not lie, photography “confirms the suppression of subjectivity” and removes any element from discovering truth from technology, but rather only finding personal interpretation and meaning (Berger 2002:51-54). Roland Barthes takes the structural argument for technology further in his discussion of the Eiffel Tower as he states that though in essence the tower is useless, to visit it allows the individual to participate in a dream — thus finding personal meaning ensconced in the steel exoskeleton (1979:5-8). Once at the top of the tower, each person can separate and group the city according to their vantage point: the city joins with nature and a new nature is formed from human space, and human interaction with architecture and technology (Barthes 1979:9-10,14-15).
It is clear then that technology is influential in the symbolic order of society, however it is important to look at technology not only as a separate tool, a system of signs encoding meaning, but to see machine and human as one. Donna Haraway sees the two not as two separate subjects, but as a type of cyborg — not in the science fiction sense of the word — blending the organic with the mechanical (1999:43). The attribution of human roles to machines is not new, but Bruno Latour claims that it is a choice we have made as a society, though it may be circumscribed choice because of social, economic, and physical restrictions (1992:236). Instead of machines, he calls these characters “nonhumans” and asserts that the “missing masses” of society now lie in the nonhuman mechanisms that surround us (Latour 1992:254). Technology is not simply a tool anymore, but a functioning and influential member of human society. Susan Buck-Morss takes this one step forward, claiming that the human being is turning his body into — or at least mimicking — the machine to protect against the shock of the machine labor itself (2002:105). Taking examples from Soviet-era Russia, she asserts that technology is human intervention into nature by means of nature’s own laws (Buck-Morss 2002:125-127).
Is technology tearing us apart or bringing us together? There is still no clear answer, but it is evident that technology not only functions in the symbolic order, just as does community and religion, but is so deeply ingrained within us that it also functions in the human domain.
Sources
Roland Barthes. “The Eiffel Tower.” In The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. New York: Noonday Press, 1979. pp 3-18.
John Berger. “The Ambiguity of the Photograph.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. (eds.) Kelly Askew and Richard R. Welk. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. pp 47-55.
Susan Buck-Morss. “Common Sense.” In Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. pp 98-133.
William Gibson. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. pp 2-74.
Donna Haraway. “Modest Witness@Second Millennium.” In The Social Shaping of Technology: Second Edition. (eds.) Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. pp 41-49.
Bruno Latour. “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. (eds.) Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. pp 75-107.
Claude Levi-Strauss. The Scope of Anthropology. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. pp 7-53.
Marcel Mauss. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. pp 1-18.
Marshall McLuhan. “The Medium is the Message.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. (eds.) Kelly Askew and Richard R. Welk. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. pp 18-26.
John Naisbitt. High Tech High Touch: Technology and Our Accelerated Search for Meaning. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2001. pp 7-112.
David Nye. “Bridges and Skyscrapers: The Geometrical Sublime.” In American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. pp 77-108.
Victor Turner. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. pp 93-111.
Raymond Williams. “The Technology and the Society.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. (eds.) Kelly Askew and Richard R. Welk. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. pp 27-40.
Langdon Winner. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Social Shaping of Technology: Second Edition. (eds.) Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. pp 28-40.