Langdon Winner - reporting on Workshop 1, "Technology in the Public Sphere"
which approaches, theories illuminate the crucial questions?are there universally, or at least broadly applicable criteria for democratic implementations of technology?
what does democracy mean - especially in the different cultural contexts of the countries represented?
there is a noted decline in participatioin in democratic institutions (lower voter turnout, etc.), leading to a decline in the perceived legitimacy of major democratic institutions - how to reinvigorate participation?
opposed rhetoric: romantic optimism vs. reactionary pessimism
cross-national experiences: how to balance expert opinion with lay opinion; whether or not beyond the sphere of the conference, they affect public opinion, national decision-making?
Experiences have been fruitful, helpful - but not a cure-all; they do offer new avenues - not simply theoretical proposals, hopeful visions.
relationship between "the people" and large aggregates of power? -- whether social relations, as reified in technical form and language, are so embedded in public life that consensus conferences only reintroduce patterns of power.
Information systems: do these various practices pose a promise of revitalizing democracy - or are they too narrow, too unfocused, contentious, biased to be any good at all?
Can the experiences of participation in Scandanavia be relevant to other contexts?
How marginalized people can appropriate technology, adapt it to their worldviews, interests, and ways of living; perhaps redeem it for their own processes - how can this be enhanced?
Workshop 2
Internal control regime in the Norwegian oil industry; worker participation, user involvement. Strong unions - safer conditions in Norway; weak unions - more dangerous in U.K.... The oil industry is open to democratization, but it takes some effort."community computing" (Shuler) We're unprepared to deal with the wave of globalization of computing. We need to develop a tapestry of democratic innovations, with some informing by theory
Workshop 3 - historians/philosophers/political scientists
1) there is a body of scholarship that examines technology/society/democracy by looking at how universal tendencies/logics work themselves out in particular local or national contexts. Liberating from earlier universalist views - Weber/Marcuse, etc. Introducing proper nouns (Norway, Japan) into a field that has otherwise refered to "modernity," "postmodernity," which refer to everywhere and nowhere at the same time.2) Mary Nolan: what is the relationship between narratives, etc. and "the real world"? Raised the question - do the ideas of productivity and growth appear as new ideas after 1945? etc. Projection: how far is pessimism about technology, democracy, capitalism projected?
3) technology and democracy: liberal/Marxist hypothesis about the erosive effects of capitalism on authoritarian tendencies have been confirmed by experience of the U.S., Spain, and Latin America - OR the authoritarian tendencies in capitalism and technology have been contained by liberal political culture?
But: will Asia provide the first counterexamples - i.e., highly technological/capitalist societies also authoritarian?
(We need to rejuvinate big government in the U.S. for the sake of democratizing.)
Generally speaking: distinctive in that they raised the question of human agency and local agency - disappears in postmodernism, but this guy thinks its real and becoming more apparent.
Workshop 4 - gender, technology, and politics in transition
the ironies of pink computer screens?what is feminist theory, critique? an important resource to be selectively used.
Why do we always talk about these things as nouns - they are processes, activities.
add the "s"; technologies and democracies - i.e., not a single "technology," not a single "democracy"
How do we not fall victim to essentialism nor false universalism?
technologies and changes in work organization
democracies: were policy makers interested in decisions that imply restrictions?
criticism of the language used - including "consensus"; use another term.
Have a meeting place for discourses on (a) the whole construction of "technology and democracy" (b) question of slowing down
What are we talking about when we talk about 'democracy' - who is a citizen / who is not being listened to - and what does technology have to do with it?
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Closing comments, Francis Sejersted
surprisingly coherent - we have made some progress in understanding the issue of how to combine technology and democracy - how complex this issue is, constraints on the combinations, dependency on national traditions. But we haven't come to any conclusions as to what we mean by technology and democracy.
Human agency has come back into the theory - a new trend.²