Dematerialization

Dematerialization can be taken variously as meaning less materials used in objects, a less materialistic outlook on consumption, or the virtualization of communication and interaction. Designer and technology advocate R. Buckminster Fuller began using the term ephemeralization in the early 1930s to mean getting more out of less, or as he once put it, “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing” (1938, 252). In Fuller's view, technological progress could over time achieve a higher standard of living for people while reducing the amount of resources consumed per person. His geodesic dome buildings, for example, used much less materials than equivalent-sized traditional structures did.

Yet Fuller's advocacy of technological solutions neglected the ways that techniques are embedded in human purposes that are not determined by efficiency, so that a higher standard of living, for example, may reflect cultural and psychological desires and purposes unrelated to needs or efficient social functioning. A higher standard of living could mean everyone driving fuel-efficient autos, where individual use of oil per vehicle is reduced, while net societal use of oil is increased and other means of efficient transport ignored.

The concept of dematerialization in the sense of whether societies are undergoing changes toward physically lighter materials in the end products of industrial production was proposed in 1989 by Robert Herman, Siamak A. Ardekani, and Jesse H. Ausubel. One could point to lighter automobiles, radios, or any number of other artifacts as examples.

A study of dematerialization in 1996 by Iddo K. Wernick and colleagues concluded that although ratios of primary materials to products did appear to be declining, and also possibly waste materials, such efficiency was offset by consumption demands. In the authors' words, “As consumers, we profess one thing (that less is more) and often do another (buy, accrete, and expand). We see no significant signs of net dematerialization at the level of the consumer or saturation of individual material wants.” Hence, the question of dematerialization as a consumption issue goes to the heart of modern consumption materialism as a system of wants and desires: something basically mental rather than material.

Considering material culture and technoculture in this light raises questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well, where smaller is not necessarily simpler, and where smaller may not even be less. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies, promising identities, and providing a cornucopia of commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in ever-proliferating material devices and in the ideas they communicate about how what one has affects what one is and can be.

Though Ralph Waldo Emerson said more than a century and a half ago that “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” the ride has only galloped ever quicker. Material technoculture is riding today with something like the speed of Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore's well-known law that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Since he pointed out the trend in 1965, it not only has continued but also manifests today in virtually all of the capabilities of electronic devices, such as speed, memory, decreasing size of device, or increasing pixels in digital cameras.

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