Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology
If one doesn’t watch the introduction of new technologies and particularly watch the infrastructures that emerge, promises of liberation through technology can become a ticket to enslavement.
Ursula Franklin died in September, and I picked this up after reading Deb Chachra’s tweets about her work. She was a badass—a Holocaust survivor, a scientist, an activist, a feminist, a Quaker, a pacifist, a mother, wife, and writer. This book, which is about the effects of technology on our every day lives, began as a series of lectures she gave in 1989. (You can listen to them here.)
There’s so much good stuff in here that I sort of don’t even know how to write a post about it. It gave me so much to think about — while I was reading it I kept seeing all of these examples of what she was writing about out in the contemporary world.
For example, I read this quote from the mayor of Pittsburgh:
“It’s not our role to throw up regulations or limit companies like Uber… You can either put up red tape or roll out the red carpet. If you want to be a 21st-century laboratory for technology, you put out the carpet.”
And immediately thought of this passage:
…we have lost the institution of government in terms of responsibility and accountability to the people. We now have nothing but a bunch of managers, who run the country to make it safe for technology.“
Or when the new iPhone came out with its ridiculous lack of headphone jacks, I thought of this passage:
….once a given technology is widely accepted and standardized, the relationship between the products of the technology and the users changes. Users have less scope, they matter less, and their needs are no longer the main concern of the designers.
Like I said, there’s so much good stuff in here I’m just overwhelmed by how to do it justice. To get an idea if you’ll dig the book, you might read Scott Berkun’s summary, or Mandy Brown’s post about prescriptive technologies, or you might just read Franklin’s obituary. A wonderful mind.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
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