nd is captured in his concept of “mobile privatization.” Williams argued that television was introduced into mainstream American
society in the early 1950s—some twenty years after it was technologically feasible—
because elites needed to ensure that post-war society remained intact in a time of stress.
This stress took two forms: (i) a trend toward ever greater mobility as people moved from job
to job; and (ii) a tendency toward the privatization of public life, where people retreated to
their homes and abandoned civil society.
These two trends came together in a social pathology Williams called “mobile privatization.”
Television served as a form of artificial or “virtual” community that acted to preserve social
order despite this pair of stresses. All societies need a semblance of social coherence to
function, or they fall apart. Television, with its imagined community of TV stars, favourite
shows, and other shared terms of reference, provided Americans wherever they lived with a
common culture. Williams’ argument is not the only social determination viewpoint, but it is
one of the most widely known.
Winner’s principal criticism of this “social determination” view is that it presumes that
technology itself is unimportant. Elite power is held to be the determining factor in all things
technological, and elites merely use technical things to get what they want. For Winner, this
means that little attention is given to the nature of tech英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】nology, and how in giving ideology
and power a material form technical things exert an influence on society that cannot be
reduced to elite interest. Technologies are not autonomous or independent of human
interest; but neither are they merely extensions of the will of the powerful.
(iii) Winner’s theory of technological politics
Winner’s theory of “technological politics” attends to the way in which political values,
biases, and ideologies are directly built into technologies. Rather than technologies being
mere instruments of elite will, as the “social determination” view has it, technological artifacts
themselves have politics.
Winner suggests two ways in which we can examine the “things themselves” as possessing
political characteristics in their own right.
society builds into technologies its own explicit prejudices, biases and
ideologies (which can be positive or negative in nature) Winner gives the example of Robert Moses, the urban planner responsible for much of
modern New York City. Moses built overpasses over the Long Island Highway only nine feet
high so that buses, typically carrying the urban poor and African-Americans, could not drive
along the Highway and enter the wealthier districts of New York City.
A similar example of such prejudices built into infrastructure is the massive alienating
apartment projects built across the urban U.S. (and to an extent, in Canada) in which the
poor were housed. Launched in t
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