In this interview Andrew Feenberg focuses on the human agent and culture as applied to (or not applied to) the development of technologies. He considers how people transform information technologies into communication technologies that better reflect the “human concern”. The human agency example is given as people develop unique hacks to repurpose technologies to address idiosyncratic needs, but also in the participatory design processes through which technologies are developed with others. Agency is exercised to affect technologies in such a way that they counteract power structures that are undemocratic. Feenberg associates it with democratic rationalization. Such rationalization contrasts the technocratic rationalization, or the idea that the order of culture is or should be established by what is implied in the design of contemporary technologies.
 
Feenberg says, “User agency is an important theme in technology studies. We are very interested in the impact of users on the redesign of technology.” He goes on to discuss his involvement in the Digital Equipment Corp., that they realized they were not just connecting machines, but people.
 
Feenberg’s early work in the 1980s with the Minitel terminals in France is interesting, which were meant for pure information and data terminals, which became hacked for personal communication (instant messaging). He also alludes to the early scandalization of the telephone being used for social purposes and the telephone engineers being shocked that the sociability emerged from something intended for use by businesses and government. The emergence of its social use was, in a way, a democratic process of feedback from users of this telephone technology.
 
Feenberg defines Critical Theory as being a critique of domination exercised through organization of technically mediated institutions. The emphasis is on how power is centralized, how people are controlled, and their minds shaped by these centralized technical institutions. Though one might read Feenberg’s interview answers and think him an alarmist, being a philosopher first, Feenberg approaches Critical Theory of Technology as one would critically approach a political ideology. He says that the dynamism coming from users is important in the democratization of so-called democratic societies and he asks if the momentum of mass culture or lobbying and corporate bribery will take control of the Internet.
 
Feenberg uses the example of broadcasting technologies that have long been configured to privelege centralized control (using the Rupert Murdoch example) and that the Internet tends to break the broadcasting monopoly (I presume through liberated syndications, podcasts, etc.) Feenberg expresses apprehension at military and particularly corprorate control over the Internet and its technologies. With regard to the future of democratic discourse on the Internet, he says, “The only thing that makes this future at all hopeful is the fact that there is already a culture established, and that culture is familiar to hundreds of millions of people.”
 
Feenberg discusses the few companies in North America engaged in “participatory design” but does not give company names. He also alludes to writing about social factors in design as early as the 1980s and subsequent groups emerged from this: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, which he refers to as a kind of virtual interior design.
 
Feenberg touches upon in the article the same ideas of usability design as Donald Norman wrote about in The Design of Everyday Things. For example, the designer put 10,000 commands into a technology where people only use 20 of them because they can’t figure out the other 9,980 commands. This is not a translation problem, but culture translation. “Know thy user”.
 
According to the interviewee, “Technology is not a strictly logical, deterministic kind of thing even though it looks that way when it is all finished and packaged and sent out into the world.” He also terms “Management nihilism” as being what can happen in a corporate environment when people with power are bombarded with lots of conflicting ideas and are not competent to decide between them, so they think that since everyone disagrees that “I’m just going to do what I want”. (The nihilism reference — and Machiavelli reference later on –also reveal Feenberg’s philosophical roots).
 
In his answers to questions about the development of online education (after distance and correspondence learning), whereas a California institution wanted to establish online learning through the cooperation of corporation and university (much to the dubiousness of students and professors alike), Feenberg had approached the university president about the actual use of the systems to which the president responds, “We’re putting in the equipment; it is up to you guys to figure out what to do with it.” Feenberg decided to reverse this logic and try to write good software for online education that would influence the field of online education itself.
 
The “deskilling of the professoriate” was discussed as being analogous to what happened to the shoemakers of the nineteenth century – how difficult and expensive craftsmen were and to somehow remove them from the equation without removing the product. Feenberg discusses the exportation of deskilled jobs, such as factory jobs, to third world countries and the negative effects on culture. He gives the example of the Asian household with Confucian virtues being weakened by a corporation who would use their respect and good will to exploit them. Feenberg also goes on to discuss that, while Asian communities may view U.S. life as the ideal, homogenization of culture will not fully take place; that the convergence on the American idea of prosperity will not necessarily create a globalization, but that technology will adapt to culture and other conceptions of prosperity (not just the American one).
 
This type of backwards usability design experience is also referenced in Donald Norman’s book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Things and The Design of Everyday Things where the author notes that as each new technology emerges, the companies forget the lessons of the past when it comes to usability design and often have to revise based on user feedback.
———-
Note: Marcuse was Feenberg’s teacher and Heidegger was Marcuse’s teacher. There are intricate philosophical social-political carry-overs in this interview with Feenberg that I find fascinating. Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer and wrote the work Being and Time (which I have some familiarity with and find to be inscrutable) however, Feenberg’s points were interesting and legible.