Tech innovation reifies the same destructive forces of neoliberalism – reinforces abstract thinking that obscures realistic accountability of impacts

The persistent narrative of the effects of technological development in contemporary societies is uncritically accepted by policy designers, decision-makers, and individuals as inevitable and determinedly positive in nature. The agenda for technology development, and in turn (re)shaping much of Western society, is primarily driven by computer scientists and strongly promoted by numerous futurist thinkers in the field. In the absence of critical awareness and dissent, many now equate any and all technological innovation and development with the rhetoric of progress. For the past 200 years or so, this has been a dominant driving force in 86 Irish Journal of Sociology 25(1) Western cultures. In The False Promises of the Digital Revolution: How Computers Transform Education, Work, and International Development in Ways that are Ecologically Unsustainable, C.A. Bowers seeks to challenge the myth that technologies, and in particular print and digital technologies, are culturally neutral and fundamental to modern advancement. Expanding upon his previous work in this area, he argues that the Darwinian/market liberal ideology that is frequently used to justify a colonizing agenda is leading to a world monoculture where data and print either ignore or replace the global cultural commons. What is being lost, he suggests, in this process is the intergenerational knowledge and experience that has provided alternatives to a cash and consumer-driven existence resulting in transformation in the viability of the natural world and growing pressures on scare natural resources. He focuses much of his attention on the way digital technologies gather, store, and have become the prevailing mode of communications in contemporary societies reinforcing abstract thinking which is unable to grasp the complexities of local cultural and environmental contexts. Such cyber-mediated consciousness is unable to comprehend differences between ecologically sustainable and unsustainable beliefs and practices and the importance of such social interactions as face-toface communications, personal memory, and sensory awareness—a given of human existence—are essentially ignored. The connections between digital technologies and corporate capitalism, which is turning the vocabulary of environmentalists into media cliche´s, is considered, as is the uneven scale of influence and imbalance of power between community-centered and corporate capitalism. He argues for innovative ethnographic studies and empirical research into how the introduction of digital technologies are transforming the beliefs and intergenerational support systems in cultures right across the globe, which should focus more robustly on patterns of moral reciprocity and on people living more ecologically sustainable lives. Bowers also argues that a history of regarding technologies as culturally neutral and an expression of progress has led to a condition where few teachers or university lecturers possess the conceptual background necessary for engaging students in debates about the cultural transforming, and sometimes ecologically damaging, nature of various new and existing technologies. It is crucial not to lose sight of the important improvements that technologies have brought to communities and people’s lives, such as contributing to medical advances, the provision of information on a wide range of activities including changes occurring in the natural systems, and relief from the exhausting nature of some physical labor. Technologies have had a powerful influence in shaping consciousness in the West but much of this is based on abstract[s]ion rooted in ideologies frequently at odds with preserving the cultural commons and environmental awareness. So how did this perception take shape and become dominant over time? Implicit in Bowers criticism that scientists and technology engineers don’t take the time away from their high degree of specialization to inform themselves about the traditions of community self-sufficiency that their inventions are undermining is the notion that social scientists are also neglecting this domain of research and appear unwilling, or indeed unable, to engage and debate with technologists at their level. Developers and engineers tend to present new technologies only in a positive light, and social scientists should shoulder a portion of the blame for allowing this occur unchallenged. Social scientists must, therefore, confront the self-serving idea that engineers and developers are purely focused on the well-being of the public and must interfere in the realities of technology innovation and development to provide a more balanced, and perhaps [a] realistic, assessment of its impacts and consequences.