Review 1: Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology (1)
[This year I’m occasionally going to use this space to reflect on works I come across that relate to issues we’re discussing in class. I hope these reflections will be helpful to you insofar as they will introduce you to material not on the course syllabus and prod your thinking in directions otherwise not taken. In general, I will choose works that have stimulated my own thinking in new directions and about which I still have questions.]
Over the holidays I was doing the dishes and turned on the radio in the middle of a CBC show. An older woman with a German accent was speaking about technology and, along the way, she had some very astute things to say about climate change. And yet there were also a few places where things did not quite add up—small things like the thinkers to whom she referred and the terms she used. For the most part, though, she was fantastically compelling and while my kids interrupted me several times I asked everyone to be quiet when the show was over since I wanted to hear her name. It turned out that I had been listening to Ursula Franklin’s Massey Lectures from 1989! The time lag accounted for the odd turns of phrase. But the wisdom of the lecture was as relevant to me in December 2020 as I’m sure it had been when it was first delivered. It reminded me of David Orr’s “What is Education For?”—one of the first texts we read in this class—and my surprise when I learned that his equally apt comments were based on a convocation address he had delivered in 1990.
Both Franklin and Orr told their audiences about existing social problems and the need for an immediate response to prevent even more serious future developments. Their audiences may have been moved or impressed as they listened but what these speakers asked of their audiences did not happen: we still do not adequately consider the impact of technology on the natural environment, as Franklin recommended; and we have not come close to making environmental education a standard component of all university education, as Orr recommended.
Franklin’s comments continued to resonate for me in the following days. Happily, her lectures had been published in a book that I was able to order from our local bookstore (finally weening myself from Amazon—something I have been trying to do ever since I learned that Amazon pays no taxes but that I finally succeeded in doing when I learned that Amazon had revenues of over 33million US dollars an hour in response to the pandemic). When we live in a society with such pronounced economic inequality and poverty, it is wrong, I believe, for corporations with no accountability to have so much of the world’s wealth. But that is a conversation for another time!).
The book arrived a few weeks later. It is comprised of the Massey Lectures that Franklin delivered in 1989 (divided into six chapters) and three additional chapters that she added in 1999 when a second edition was published. It is a remarkable and startling book and I recommend it. My comments here relate only to the book’s early pages. In subsequent posts I hope to discuss some of the other issues she raises.
Franklin begins by observing that technology “has built the house in which we all live. The house is continually being extended and remodelled. More and more of human life takes place within its walls, so that today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house.” We are all effected by its design, she continues, “by the division of its space, by the location of its doors and walls” (1).
Think about this for a moment. Are there spaces in your life that are outside “the house that technology has built,” as Franklin puts it? What comes to mind for me here are some of your Local Observations from last semester. Some of you wrote about areas that seemed quite remote from technology: fields, trees, patches of grass. But many of you wrote about spaces that were related to technology: sheds, driveways, balconies, fences. Even in the spaces remote from technology, in writing about them you used the technology of writing to make sense of them. Several of you also used your phones to take pictures. And all of you used your computers to write the assignments and the technological interface of this course to submit your assignments. I’ll return to these points in a moment.
But first we should define of technology. If you look up the word in the dictionary you will find something like this (from the Miriam-Webster dictionary on my computer):
· the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry
· machinery and devices developed from scientific knowledge
· the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences
How is any of this relevant to our English course? Surely few areas are more remote from our area of study than industry, machinery, engineering, and applied sciences? But this is a course on literary and cultural studies and climate change and we have been thinking about these issues—while not usually naming them as technology—since the beginning of the year. Orr has also reminded us of the importance of an integrated curriculum in which we think about how all of the disciplines bear on each other. Franklin deepens these inquiries, however, by focusing on technology as a practice, as a way of doing things that shapes how we position ourselves in the world and also, importantly, how we think.
Here is how Franklin understands technology: “Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset” (3). Now we are coming closer to what we traditionally do in literature classes for we, too, consider symbols, new words, and mindsets as well as the systems that make them comprehensible to us. We do not tend to call this technology though, just as we do not tend to call our tools for writing technology. That is, we don’t tend to notice our pens and pencils as technological instruments despite how easily we assign that term to the devices—computers, ipads, phones—most of us now use more than the pens and pencils that once dominated communication fields.
So what? Does it matter that technology penetrates so many dimensions of our lives? Does it make a difference that you write your essay on a computer and submit it via a web portal? One very obvious result is that it makes your work more uniform. When you submit your essay it resembles, in form, all of the other essays students submit in the class. The CuLearn portal through which the course is delivered does something similar: it makes the courses you take more uniform. You understand the format and through that understanding navigate your courses more easily. The format also allows me to track you and you to track me. I can know when—the precise time, to the second—you’ve submitted your assignments and you can know when you’ve received feedback. What Franklin is asking us to do is, first, notice the technology and, second, think about the ways in which technology is a practice and, in turn, shapes how we think. In short, she highlights two of the foci of our class: noticing and angling. To take another example from CuLearn: the system shuts you out from submitting late papers. I format a timeframe for paper submission into the system—say, midnight of the day it is due—and after that time, you can no longer submit. Before we used CuLearn, it was not the computer that received the paper, but the professor. What difference, if any, does that make? It was also not the professor who said, no, you can’t submit your paper now, but, seemingly, the system. What difference, if any, does that make? I think there are many implications not least of which is that this shift, and others like it, accustoms us to the presence of computer technologies at important life junctures. But the important point for us, in this class, is to notice the technology in our lives and how it works.
If all of this still seems remote from an English class, it probably seems equally remote from the climate crisis that we have been discussing all semester. But as I noted above, Franklin discusses climate change—admittedly not using that phrase—in her lectures. I’ll come back to the climate change connection in later posts but, for now, you might want to return to the readings we did from Yuval Harari and Rebecca Solnit. I’ll leave you with a comment from the early pages of Franklin’s book. Her title, she notes, plays on a book by C. B. Macpherson entitled The Real World of Democracy. Franklin writes, “Technology, like democracy, includes ideas and practices; it includes myths and various models of reality. And like democracy, technology changes the social and individual relationships between us. It has forced us to reexamine and redefine our notions of power and accountability” (2). Ideas and practices; myths and models of reality; social and individual relations; power and accountability—these are all concepts to which we will continue to return as we think about climate change and the humanities.
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Note: if any of you are interested in reading Franklin’s book yourselves, let me know and I’ll send you a copy on the condition that you will read at least two chapters of it and let me know what you think.
Related works: Often we encounter the cultural works that move and inspire us by chance as I did when I happened to listen to that CBC rebroadcast of Franklin’s lectures in early December. But we also rely on suggestions from others. If you’re interested in learning more about Franklin I highly recommend her The Real World of Technology. In learning more about Franklin’s work I also discovered Heather Menzies’s books. She happens to teach at Carleton—lucky for us—and her work seems, in part, informed by Franklin’s work. I also sometimes listen to a podcast, 99% Invisible, that considers the ways in which design, often invisibly, shapes our world. Now that I’ve read a bit of Franklin, this podcast, too, seems to resonate with her thinking.
