Digital Networks and Services: A New Political and Technological Agenda

Abstract

When analysing the technology-society binomial in his famous work on the medium of TV, Raymond Williams (1974) advocated an interpretation that regards technology as an object looked for and developed on the basis of certain purposes and practices (known social needs) that precede it. This involves stepping back from both so-called technological determinism and from the viewpoint of symptomatic technology, two perspectives deeply rooted in modern social thought that depend for their formulation on the isolation of technology. While technological determinism understands that ‘new technologies are discovered, by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions for social change and progress, the view of symptomatic technology ‘assumes that research and development are self-generating, but in a more marginal way. What is discovered in the margin is then taken up and used’. Distancing himself from both perspectives, Williams was to state that broadcasting, like any other technology, is the result of ‘a set of emphases and responses within the determining limits and pressures of industrial capitalist society’.