THE REAL WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY
URSULA M. FRANKLIN
start from the premise that we are living in a ve I, • ifficult, very interesting time, a time in which 1-,27 • a, a major historical perio4 is coming to a conVo - • end. I think we live in a time in which the social and political upheaval is as great or greater than it was at the time of the Reformation. And so I would like to do a bit of orienteering and map-making so the discourse in which we all have to engage can be conducted in a common language. As I see it, technology has built the house in which we all live. The house is continually being extend-ed and remodelled. More and more of human life takes place within its walls, so that today there is hard-ly any human activity that does not occur within this house. All are affected by the design of the house, by the division of its space, by the location of its doors and walls. Compared to people in earlier times, we rarely have a chance to live outside this house. And the house is still changing; it is still being built as well as being demolished. In these lectures, I would like to take you through the house, starting with the foundation and then examining with you the walls that have been put up or taken down, the storeys and turrets that have been added, the flow of people through the house—who can come in, who can go into particular spaces. In the past, I have often spoken about the social impact of technology in terms of apprehension and foreboding, but this is not my purpose here. My interest is in contributing to clarity. I want to know as much as possible about the house that technology has built, about its secret passages and about its trapdoors. And I would also like to look at technology in the way C. B. Macpherson looked at democracy'—in terms of the real world. Technology, like democracy, includes ideas and practices; it includes myths and various models of reality. And like democracy, technology changes the social and individual relationships between us. It has forced us to examine and redefine our notions of power and of accountability. In this lecture, I would like to talk about technology as practice, about the organization of work and of people, and I would like to look at some models that underlie our thinking and discussions about tech-nology. Before going any further, I should like to say what, in my approach, technology is not. Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmit-ters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset. In subsequent lectures, I will focus on technology as it has changed our realities of time and space. I will talk about planning and forecasting, and about the many attempts to predict the impact of tech-nology. It will also be necessary to deal with the confusion that sometimes exists between the notion of the so-called objectivity of technology and the fact that, in a narrow sense, some of the outcomes of tech-nological processes are predictable. It will be important to examine the human and the social impacts of technology, and we must talk about the changing nature of experience, as well as about the fragmenta-