This unit is really about how a certain kind of technology – media and communications technology as it would once have been called – comes to be embedded in our everyday lives. It is about how ways of living, working and even playing, change gradually (and sometimes very quickly) from being constituted in largely face-to-face activities, to being characterised by a mediated distance that results from the technological enhancement of daily life. These developments are evident in the objects we surround ourselves with – from televisions to telephones and computers to credit cards, and on and on and on.
If we look at this photograph, there is much that can be learned about a world that, in many respects, seems to have vanished with the passing of time. What we are looking at is a workplace devoted to the organisation and management of information. Whatever else they are doing – running an advertising agency, a food distribution company, or whatever – they are organising information and working towards facilitating its easy communication.
There are no computers here, only typewriters, paper and filing cabinets. Today those banks of filing cabinets have largely been replaced by digital documents. Yet, for all this might look like a quaint vision of a bygone era, it is also the image of a modern, rationalised, technologised, organisation that was common for much of the 20th century.
It is worth making a general point about technology: technology has always been concerned to bend the world to human needs – that has remained the case from technologies as seemingly basic as the hand-woven basket to today’s smartphones. They are things that presume to make our lives easier. As such, technology just embodies – in its various forms and objects – material processes and social relations between people. Technology, as we see it in this office, was embodied in what might roughly be described as service functions. The workers – all women, you may notice – were service workers.
Today, almost everyone who works in a business organisation that relies on communication – and that might include everyone who does not dig ditches, empty garbage or perform so-called ‘menial’ tasks for a living – takes on a variety of those tasks that once belonged to a specific class of service workers. The fact that this is the case explains how pervasive information and communications have become in contemporary life. It is a fact whose implications we need to observe and understand.
This is a picture of a mundane world of technology. Today, information and communications technology is mundane in rather different ways; but to understand the ways in which it has become woven into our everyday lives, we need to begin by considering how it began its drift from the specialised field of the military and industrial worlds into all aspects of life today. It begins with notions such as ‘Information Technology’, ‘Cybernetics’, and ‘real time computing’, which – through the late 20th century – move from the technical to the personal.
