Session 11
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Discussion Questions

The Evans book was one of the best selling of a spate of books in the late 1970s about the “microelectronic” revolution and the social impact of personal computers. The first part, which you aren’t reading, includes a history of early computing, Babbage, ENIAC, etc. Evans presents the remainder of his book as the inevitable but accelerated result of this process.

  1. What does Evans think is driving this “revolution”? What role does he think society has in directing it? What would Winner say about this.

  2. As you read the book, you will notice predicted technologies of three kinds. Technologies we now take for granted, technologies that are still some way off, and technologies we tried or could have but didn’t turn out to want. Make a note of which technologies fall into each group.

  3. Evans credits computer aided decision making with “the imminent emancipation of man from, on the one hand, the rule of the committee, and, on the other, from the inspired hunch of the autocrat.” How does this compare with Levy’s description of the effects of the spreadsheet?

  4. He has some interesting predictions on the future of money. How far did they get towards coming true? Why is cash still here, anyway?

  5. According to page 169, “the robot is about to become both convenient and sensationally cost effective”. He also predicts massive shrinkage of the workday, to 4 hours by 1990. Why didn’t things work out this way?

  6. Evans makes an argument, very similar to one made today about China, that new electronic technology would reshape the autocratic society of the USSR. Do you believe it played a role in the collapse of this country?

  7. Winner confronts head-on the claim that access to more information will make society more democratic, more equal and so on. Is the Internet working out that way? Does it make sense to talk about a revolution?

Additional Resources

bulletThe entire idea of a fundamental social revolution and economic sparked by changing information technology is obviously not something that went away in the late 1970s. We will be returning to it later, and dozens of 1990s articles in Wired magazine alone are either elaborating on Evans' themes (generally unknowingly) or disputing them.
bulletThere hasn't really been a proper history of the whole late-70s "micro revolution" thing. But there is quite a good book ( F. Webster, Theories of the Information Society: Routledge, 1995) about the intellectual side of it. It became deeply entangled with the concept of a post-industrial society expressed by  Daniel Bell in his 1976 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
bulletAn Australian internet research company called Carlson Analytics has a nice guide to all this stuff on its website. The guide to the "digital environment" is particularly interesting if you want to get a sense for more recent writing on the same themes.

 

 


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