Unit 9 - Society & the Future

Lecture

Who is in control here anyway?

Do you remember the Great Power Outage on the East Coast last year? While I am very sorry about the inconveniences and danger experienced by the people in the NW quadrant of the country, the timing of the Great Power Outage couldn’t have been more fortuitous for my class that term. My question for the week, “Who is in control here anyway?,” was being raised all over the media and was soon be a topic in Congress. Of course, they don’t mean quite the same thing by the question as I do because they are looking for someone or some group to blame. As a sociologist, I’m really asking, “Are we in control of the technology we’ve created or has it “taken over?” As Volti explains in Chapter 15, this question gives us a perfect opportunity to use sociological concepts & ideas to put technology in a social context. We aren’t talking about a situation where robots have secretly taken over the government. What we are suggesting that technology becomes interwoven with our social institutions and our culture in such a way that we must use it to maintain social stability. That means we can’t change our use of technologies without changing our social arrangements. And, I think that means that we are not in control of the technologies we have created. The power outage is a perfect example of the ways in which technologies determine how we live our lives and how much change there would have to be in society if those technologies were not available. The lack of electrical power in the NW raises what both Volti and I believe to be one of the one of the central questions of our time. Our answers are slightly different (I’m more of a technological determinist than he is) and I ’d like you to think about yours.

Before I go on to give you my answer to the question of who is in control, here are a few examples of how the concepts we’ve covered in the course can be used to understand the social aspects of the power outage. This event provides a perfect example of a rational system in action. The power grid is a system with both human elements & material components. All of those parts of the system must function appropriately for the outcome to be stable. The goals of the system are efficiency, calculablity, and predictability. Normally those goals are met but once in a while something goes wrong and throws the system out of balance. Then you see the irrational consequences of rational systems. In this case, the very safeguards that are designed to perfect & maintain the power grid are the elements that throw it into chaos. Those “breaker switches,” designed to protect the other components, overreact and throw the system into chaos. The same is true if you add in not only the power grid itself but the social components that it supports – such as the economic institution, the transportation systems (local, national, & global), media, and law enforcement. All of those social activities were disrupted, became chaotic, and were affected, by the outage for quite a while. I heard one commentator say that this event, coming on top of all other recent disasters, may push the airline industry over the end. Talk about the irrational consequences of rational systems!

And that brings us to the sociological imagination. Remember that the sociological imagination suggests that the way we live our lives and the people we become are dependent upon the time and place in which we live. Technologies are a big part of the “time & place.” Nothing could demonstrate this idea more clearly than a massive power outage. The loss of electricity meant that very little was normal about people’s lives. They couldn’t work; lights are gone, machines stopped, computers are out. Couldn’t get home; transportation systems are disrupted. Couldn’t stay in their homes if they were there; no air conditioning and many people are totally dependent upon that to live in the type of homes we’ve constructed in the areas we’ve built them. Life is not normal without electricity. Our lives are dependent on the technology. The material conditions of our lives determine, I would argue, what happens to us and we are not in control of that. We can, of course, control how we respond to the material conditions but that isn’t the same as being in control of the technology.

We do, as Volti suggests (2001: 265) assume that we are in control. It is one of our cultural beliefs. I heard people express that belief over and over “We were promised this wouldn’t happen.” “How could this happen?” “Don’t we have safeguards in action to prevent this kind of thing?” One engineer said, “I have worked my whole life to make it impossible for this to happen.” All of those comments imply a belief that we are in control; that we can “fix” it so it doesn’t happen again. In our culture we value control over the environment and over our creations. We value our technological expertise. We think that “…technology is always subject to human control (Volti, 2001: 265). Despite warnings to the contrary, the dominant cultural perspective is that we can prevent shuttle accidents, power outages, and traffic jams. A sociological analysis using the concept of culture would suggest otherwise.

Finally, institution would be another useful concept for this analysis. While other institutions could ultimately be affected, the political and economic institutions are most closely linked in this system. Bill Richardson, former Secretary of Energy, now governor of New Mexico, was not surprised by outage. He’s been lobbying Congress for years to upgrade the grid. Says we have a third world system. It can’t handle current energy needs. The “fix” would cost billions & billions of dollars and no one can really make a profit from “electricity modernization.” It would be a “good” for all of society but recovering the cost of upgrades is prohibitive. Not upgrading, of course, will be expensive too, but that cost is diffuse – except in times of disaster. I mentioned the airline industry above. There are also the businesses that require electricity for refrigeration (florists & restaurants), hotels whose clients will not want to pay for rooms they couldn’t use. Lost time at work for millions and lost opportunities for thousands. Some benefited, of course. Hot dog vendors, taxi drivers, and tourists with the experience of a lifetime, but overall, great disruption for the patterns that make up the economic institution. And an opportunity to observe the political institution to see deliberate social change is so difficult.

Ok, so here’s the lecture as I had written it before the Great Power Outage of 2003. I’m making the case that the answer to the question of “Who is in control here, anyway?” is nobody. Or everybody. But not “somebody.” Collectively, yes. It all results from human action, as Volti describes very clearly in Chapters 15 & 16, but not as the result of our will. As Dick Clarke, a former energy czar said on Good Morning America shortly after the outage, “…our nation is now run by a cyber nervous system.” The words are his, the emphasis mine. After you’ve read the lecture and the text, I’ll ask you to discuss what you think about this question with your group. Hopefully you can see why the sociological answer to the question puts technology squarely in a social context.