Intelligently Steering Toward More Communitarian Technological Societies

This chapter applies the intelligent trial-and-error framework developed by Edward Woodhouse and David Collingridge to technologies that impact community life. The framework has generally been used to analyse technologies with environmental, physiological, and financial – rather than psychocultural – risks. This chapter explores how technological innovation related to driverless cars and social robots would proceed if important decision makers were to take their potential social and communal risks seriously. Next, intelligent trial-and-error is proposed as a set strategies to make attempts to deploy communitarian technologies more effective, considering the cases of residential development and cooperative grocery stores. Finally, this chapter examines the barriers to getting intelligent trial-and-error applied more of the time and to already existing, rather than only emerging, technologies.

Achieving Communitarian Techniques and Artifacts

This chapter explores the socio-political factors that ensure the obduracy of thinly communal domestic environments, child-rearing techniques, and consumer technologies. Sociopolitical support is lacking for heat sources that encourage congregation and for the practice of collective mealtimes. Cultural ideas and anxieties regarding sleep and child development deter parents from co-sleeping with their children. A lack of architectural imagination and municipal support makes it challenging to build vibrant and comfortable public spaces. Budget crunches and “warrior cop” culture stand in the way of more communal policing arrangements. Family members’ lack of sufficient experience working through conflict productively and several wrongheaded policies prevent the better integration of the aged into thick social webs. Finally, take back laws and tool libraries are likely be necessary if communities of repair are to flourish. In any case, targeting the artifacts that support networked individualism is probably more challenging than larger scale technologies, given the dominance of technologically liberal worldviews. Insofar as citizens see technologies as volition-enhancers rather than also barriers to desirable modes of life, any intervention is liable to be seen as infringing on their freedom.

Techniques and Gadgets: Socializing Individuals or Developing Communitarian Beings?

This chapter begins with the observation that people must learn the dispositions, expectations and capacities necessary for thick communal life. Hence, the techniques and tools that make up everyday life from birth are just as important as urban form and the Internet. The “cry-it-out” method and the provision of private bedrooms enculturates an attachment to ideas of independence and self-reliance. The narrow provisioning of youth autonomy to automobile, information and retail networks teaches children that freedom comes from detaching from one’s ties. Traditionally, youth autonomy was afforded through community rather than outside of it. Technologies like air conditioning, television, and personal digital devices encourage private cocooning over public congregation. Technologies like the concealed carry handgun and social robots provide private alternatives to the collective provision of safety and intimacy. Finally, hard to repair or overly complex technologies stymie the development of communities of repair and tinkering.

Suburban Networks and Urban Villages: Community and the Built Environment

This chapter interrogates the built environment with respect to its compatibility with thick community. Echoing and extending the analyses of Jane Jacobs and Ray Oldenburg, it is argued that much of the urban environment in technological societies – from suburban sprawl to urban renewal high rises – effectively legislates that citizens live as networked individuals. Not only does the coarse graining of these spaces functionally segregate different facets of everyday life, they ensure that social ties are diffuse and single-threaded. Their lack of appropriate density and walkable amenities limits serendipitous interactions and other activities that support the growth of place-based social connection. Moreover, their poor affordances for “third places” such as pubs and cafes limits the sociability of most neighborhoods. Finally, the governance structures of most areas is either weakly democratic, unable to support constructive ways of working through conflict, or not scaled so as to match the physical boundaries of urban communities.

Toward Technology Studies That Matter

This chapter provides a summary of the book’s argument. It begins by drawing analogies between the contemporary provision of belonging in technological societies and the Oneida religious commune. The two are more similar than one might first expect. Next, the book’s arguments are summarized. The preceding analysis is described as presenting the networking of community as a case of technological lock-in: The sociotechnical makeup of many so-called advanced nations has made any mode of life other than networked individualism increasingly difficult to realize. Not only do artifacts, techniques, infrastructures and organizations stymie citizens’ efforts but policies, dominant economic arrangements, cultural norms and beliefs, and entrenched practices, in turn, reinforce and stabilize their influence. The chapter ends with a discussion of the advantages of the reconstructivist approach to the question concerning technology and community taken in this book and a call for more technology studies research to focus explicitly on providing assistance ordinary citizens. If technology scholars are not on the forefront of exploring how a more desirable technological civilization might be realized, who will be?

Imagining More Communitarian Infrastructures and Organizations

This chapter investigates the possibilities for better supporting more communitarian infrastructure and organizations. Community energy progresses too slowly because of an uncertain policy environment. More communal retail is lacking in part due to the various subsidies provided to large chains and online stores. Public transit is slowed by both inappropriate expectations that they have little effect on automobile traffic and the wrongheaded insistence that they support themselves primarily through fares. Other barriers are cultural. For example, transit authorities tend go for grand projects rather than incremental changes; potential synergies between different cooperative retail arrangements remain unrealized; the insistence that information be “free” stands in the way of communally governed Internets. Budgeting practices that privilege dollars saved over community benefit, moreover, leads to inappropriately scaled organizations: community buildings and schools too large to center community life. Anxieties over performance stifle the development of democratic schools. Finally, tax laws do too little to distinguish non-profits that provide broad community benefits from those that serve the needs of small, isolated, and relatively privileged populations.

Lessening the Obduracy of Networked Urbanity

This chapter outlines the constellation of economic, political, and cultural barriers to more communitarian urban spaces. The momentum of suburbia is shown to have as much to do with entrenched zoning rules and building codes, the mispricing of development charges and utility fees, and the lack of appropriate expertise among architects and planners as the sheer mass of already existing built form. Moving to more communitarian urban spaces will require ending the public subsidy of sprawl, changing the way mortgages are approved, ending the automatic provision of free parking, better supporting a range of more democratic urban development practices, among other changes. Finally, neighbourhood amenities, including third places, could be publicly supported and collectively governed.

Infrastructures and Organizations: Embedding Members or Networking Individuals?

This chapter describes how many contemporary infrastructures and organizations, like the Internet, road networks, and public schooling, stifle the development of thick community. Most are more like indoor plumbing than village wells: They provide no impetus toward social interaction, frame users as atomized consumers, and are impersonal and weakly democratic. Thick communitarian organizations and infrastructures are scaled to the physical limits of symbolic or embodied community, treat goods as common-pool resources to be co-governed by members, and draw residents together into dense social webs. Steering toward more communitarian technological societies will entail better recognizing how different arrangements for buying groceries or fulfilling one’s spiritual needs have ramifying consequences for the practice of community. Finally, the moral dimension of networked infrastructures and organizations is explored. The dominant “technologically liberal” understanding of these structures is paradoxical: They are celebrated as liberating, despite being largely controlled by distant managers and being incompatible with certain modes of being.

From Thick to Thin: The Seven Dimensions of Communality

This chapter attempts to break away from the narrow and vague definitions of community that plague scholarship as much as popular thought. Rather than reduce community to a single facet of social reality, whether networks of ties or shared symbols, or begin with the dichotomizing frame of authentic/inauthentic community, this chapter depicts community as a seven dimensional social phenomenon. Different instantiations of community vary with regard to the thickness of their webs of social ties, practices of exchange and mutual aid, frequency and depth of talking, production of a symbolic or psychological sense of belonging, degree of economic interdependence, extent to which politics and justice reaffirm rather than sever relationships, and strength of a moral order emphasizing collective rather than private interests. While networked individualism, as a result, can be understood as a genuine instance of community, it remains relatively thin with respect to several of the dimensions of communality.

The Politics of Networked Individualism

This chapter outlines the politics of networked individualism as a social phenomenon, locating the lack of attention to these politics within the discourse surrounding networked individualism in the tendency to naturalize technological change. The theory of networked individualism frames individuals as liberated social entrepreneurs, free to assemble their own portfolios of ties, obscuring how that ability to network and satisfaction gained from it are unequally distributed. Within network discourses, moreover, network technologies are depicted as simply spreading through populations rather than as the result of contingent socio-political factors. The resulting discourse, perhaps inadvertently, is biased toward justifying reverse adapation: The process by which people’s expectations for social life are adapted to what current technologies offer, rather than altering technologies to align with citizens’ view of the good life. Such discourse, if widely accepted, threatens to conserve networked individualism as the status quo mode of being for the foreseeable future.