Information and Communications Technologies: Luddism Revisited

Information and Communications Technologies: Luddism Revisited

It is now over 10 years since my book, Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis (written with Kevin Robins), was first published, and about a decade and a half since it was being researched and written. We have witnessed a great deal of development since that time in the information technology (IT) realm: PCs have become commonplace, Windows 95 and 98 have arrived, CD-ROMs are widely available, BSkyB has made inroads into terrestrial television's territory. People have even stopped talking about IT, preferring the acronym ICT because it encompasses both information and communications technologies.

One cannot be surprised at this. From early days, it was appreciated that the IT ‘revolution’ was set to be pervasive, continuous, even ordinary. It was actually one of the aims of the book to underline that information technologies were part and parcel of a historical process, uneven but ongoing, a core feature of which was persistent innovation and change. Thus it wasn't so much a matter of rudely ‘waking up’ to the ‘microelectronics revolution’, as the then Prime Minister James Callaghan warned in 1979. More important was to realize that this technological spurt was best understood as an integral element of the continuous adaptation and expansion of advanced capitalist forces which were facing a particular set of circumstances. Hence it was largely a matter of enhancing computer communications as corporate institutions spread their reach, of incorporating electronic devices in television and stereo sets as the market for home entertainments burgeoned, of mechanizing and automating processes where competitive edge might be found.

Looking back over the decade, two things seem to me especially striking. First, at what one might call the intellectual level – though this was always much more than a cerebral matter – the ideas of Daniel Bell have prevailed. He had coined the term ‘post-industrial’ back in the 1960s, and from the outset it was subject to unrelenting and devastating attack from fellow academics, but here we are in the late 1990s and ‘post-industrialism’, updated now into the concept of an ‘information society’ (though the rationale and defining characteristics have changed not a jot), is routinely used as a means of designating the current era. Professor Bell has won out: [Page 61]it is now quite orthodox to conjure, as a matter of unarguable fact, his ‘information society’ as the knowledge-based, high tech and service-centred world we allegedly inhabit (cf. Feather, 1994; Haywood, 1995). Even sceptical and serious social scientists have succumbed to this terminology (cf. Lyon, 1988; Stehr, 1994; Lash and Urry, 1995). And even leftist accounts of ‘Post-Fordism’ and ‘flexible specialization’ testify to the ‘revival of post-industrial theory’ (Kumar, 1995; and especially Castells, 1996–8).

Secondly, for me it is especially noticeable that, in the present period, we are experiencing the renaissance of one of our prime targets of the early 1980s, namely a utopianism that seizes on the newest technologies to announce a radical break with current arrangements and the coming of all manner of wonderful changes. We had supposed, naively it turns out, that the ordinariness of computerization, as well as the failure of the ‘mighty micro’ to bring about earth-shattering transformations during the 1980s, would have disabused and deterred the techno-enthusiasts.

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