Assumptions about technology

I believe that in American culture, technology has been profoundly shaped by demands for ease. I have shown that ease can be broken down into a large number of qualities which are demanded for all kinds of technology—from toaster ovens to automobiles to, of course, computers. This excerpt from my essay “Ease and Electracy” outlines some of those assumptions. To learn more, read the entire essay from which this excerpt is extracted, or consult the sources listed below.

The easy view of technology

Generally speaking, ease encourages a paradoxical technological determinism which, while venerating technology, downplays human involvement in its creation and control, and encourages adopting a lackadaisical, even cynical attitude towards it. In the easy view, technology is a natural force, like weather, which we embrace if pleasant, but grudgingly tolerate otherwise. Ease supports five assumptions about technology (all present in the influential application of ease to writing):

  1. Technology is not innately difficult; it can be made easy. Only extremely complicated technology must be complex or difficult.
  2. Simple, transparent, easy technology is good and normal; anything different is a failure or aberration.
  3. Technology works best when it emulates natural objects, systems, and practices.
  4. Technology development and economic growth correlate (personally and nationally).
  5. Technological progress is constant, consistent, natural, and inevitable.

New media are produced and displayed using computers and other electronics. Compared to writing—which has been made easy and thus appears natural and transparent—new media appear highly technological, disassociated from the tradition of the humanities, an intrusive and misguided attempt to replace poets and artists with programmers and algorithms. Overzealous hypertext advocates like Mark Bernstein perpetuate this belief by portraying established textual forms as inadequate relics, providing fodder for classifying new media an “extremely complicated” or “bad/failure” technology in the five-part schema above. Hypertext proponents who sneer at literate forms help perpetuate the belief that emergent technologies (and media) replace and destroy their predecessors—the oversimplified “supersession” model which remains powerful though frequently debunked by Marshall McLuhan, Paul Duguid, and others. Combined with the easy view of technology, this perspective reinforces the belief that the best response to new media is no response at all—better to wait for the next emergent technology, or for new media made easy.

The high profile of transparency in this view of technology can create additional repercussions. Marcel O’Gorman illustrates that valorizing transparency dissolves most conscious confrontation with the workings of technology, following the assumption that the best communication and technology appears without mediation. But unlike most writing, new media often calls attention to its mediation, through components such as scroll bars and download progress indicators. Interface control elements are sometimes even presented as part of the “content” itself, as is the case with many video games, which display the inventory, health, or game completion conspicuously (Manovich 210). Some games allow shifts quick shifts between topographic and cinematic points of view—a direct manipulation of the cinematic language which mediates game play (Manovich 83–4). This heavily interactive relationship flies in the face of “easy” norms.

O’Gorman and others have also argued that consistent demands for transparent, easy technology can lead to dependency on ease which discourages learning generalized approaches to tasks, or understanding the conceptual model behind a certain form of technology. Practical knowledge, if developed, is highly contextualized; for example, instead of learning how hypertext links function, one learns how to make links with a certain program. Robert R. Johnson has shown that for users of such systems, the lack of generalized practical knowledge can can cause serious difficulty if trouble arises:

[User-friendly interfaces] can mask the complexities of the system to such an extent that if there is a system breakdown, such as when you receive a cryptic error message that explains the problem in virtually encrypted language [. . .] you are left helpless, unable to solve the problem, and continue with your work because you are dependent on external expertise not available to you in any useful form. (28)

This has certainly been the case with new media. Consider the web-based course support software BlackBoard, widely used because it makes web site production easy—with it, creating a sophisticated course web site requires minimal technical knowledge of hypertext. To the instructor using it, the complex hypertext file structure is transparent. However, in Fall 2001, when BlackBoard began charging some users for courseware server access which had previously been free, composition instructors had to download their course materials, lose their work, or pay for continued use. At the time, to move content from BlackBoard elsewhere, hundreds of files of different types had to be transferred individually (Harris). The sudden suspension of transparency turned “a course web site” into “a collection of hierarchically organized files,” pushing many into the helplessness Johnson notes above.

Novice/expert separation

Johnson’s advocacy of a user-centered model of technology includes a critique of the forced novice/expert separation created by system-centered technology. Ease supports this distinction in the process of simplification, in which experts render complexity and difficulty palatable for novices (for example, in composition, classical rhetorical theory and the essay were simplified into static abstractions and the five-paragraph theme). For most users of technology, expertise remains reserved for the system and its creators:

[T]he system is powerfully hegemonic: the system is the source and ultimately the determiner of all. System-centered technology [. . .] locates the technological system or artifact in a primary position. There is no need for the user to be involved with system or artifact development, this perspective suggests, because the system is too complex and therefore should be designed and developed by experts who know what is most appropriate in the system design. (26)

Ease even encourages novices to cultivate their “inability” to comprehend the complex and instead defer to expertise (both human and computer agency—for example, by considering that programming is impossible without a sophisticated “helper” application). Perhaps acknowledging the self-deprecating yet very popular “For Dummies” book series, Johnson calls acceptance of the disenfranchising the system-centered model “technological idiocy”:

Users reside on the weak side of the idiot/genius binary. We have embedded the notion of technological idiocy so strongly in our culture that we actually begin to think of ourselves as idiots when we encounter technological breakdowns. Experts are the ones who “know,” so we let them have the power, which of course means we accept whatever is given to us. (45)

Due to the emergent character of new media, expertise should be less powerful, since to some extent, everyone using new media is a novice. However, the novice/expert binary is well-established. Software for producing digital films, hypertext, and other new media is separated into “consumer” and “professional” markets (such as Apple’s film editing applications iMovie, Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Pro). The resistance to seeing code typical of ease backs reduced support or exclusion of scripting or programming languages from consumer-level applications, since programming is presumably for experts only. Generally speaking, the assumption that new media are too complex for most folks to fully understand, let alone produce, allows the spread of the novice/expert system to new media. While students might be asked to build hypertexts or make simple new media objects, classroom use more often encourages consumption through web-based research or viewing and analysis, further enforcing the novice/expert division.

Discouraging experimentation

The pragmatic and expedient character of ease, and its associated portrayal of technological systems as foreign and potentially hazardous, discourages novelty and experimentation. Physical and systemic constraints often present in easy technologies enforce this restriction. The “information appliance” model Norman advocates in The Invisible Computer replaces general-purpose technology (like the personal computer) with highly specialized systems. Instead of a PC, one would have a document making computer, a music computer, a cooking computer, etc. Certainly, there are advantages to this framework (consider electronic organizers like the PDA), but these machines make experimentation less possible by restricting their function. Similarly, in the U. S. News article mentioned earlier, human-computer interaction expert Ben Shneiderman suggested making computers work like automobiles: put the working parts under the hood, out of the reach and concern of most. However, the hood is often welded shut, literally or metaphorically, excluding both would-be experimenters and those looking to repair technology on their own. [12] In writing and in new media, the use of “easy” forms discourages divergence from the norm. For example, using the templates or “wizards” in PowerPoint encourages creation of a series of slides which each have three or four bullet points, colorful charts and graphs, and an “inspirational” conclusion (Parker 76–7). Creating unconventional presentations is not supported by the software “wizards”—those in the application, in Redmond, or in Cupertino.

Given that new media arenew, it’s reasonable to expect some freedom to experiment with form, and a little less pressure to be conventional. But at least with web-based hypertext, constraints and demands for standardization have appeared rapidly. Influential writers like Jakob Nielsen have actively discouraged experimentation and deviation from the norm, even if conventional principles are questionable from a designer’s perspective:

If 80% or more of the big sites do things in a single way, then this is the de-facto standard and you have to comply. [. . .] I recommend following the conventions even in those cases where a different design would be better if seen in isolation. (“When Bad Design”)

In this model, templates and wizards become the logical method for production of new media. Given the problems Parker has observed with templates in PowerPoint, this seems extremely problematic—would a template- or wizard-created argumentative essay be acceptable in a first-year composition course? Perhaps more importantly, discouragement of experimentation also reinforces the pragmatic, vocational, even transactional character of education. Nielsen actively discourages use of the web which doesn’t fit the “e-commerce” model: “While I acknowledge that there is a need for art, fun, and a general good time on the web, I believe that the main goal of most web projects should be to make it easy for customers to perform useful tasks” (Designing Web Usability 11).

Further reading