On the Utility and Social Change of Technological Innovation

"It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being."

John Stuart Mill

--

I must always muse at comments like Mill's quote above. He makes a fairly accurate point--the average American works just as much now (if not more) than he did prior to many of the inventions that have come to integrate themselves into the fabric of our lives. Their improvement on our productivity is tremendous. We may spend the same (or more) hours of our day toiling, but the end-product is much greater, and the utility we gain from that product (in monetary terms) is perhaps exponentially greater. It is interesting how most people examine technology from a purely utilitarian perspective, though (which is, I suppose, why I chose a Mill quote for the irony). The social changes, when examined, are generally done so in employing normative criteria, and people frequently lament technology's destruction of "traditional this or that."

Just as the invention of the devices that created commercial agriculture were chastised as destroying the traditional farming family and the nostalgia of rural America, the advent of Social Computing is now being described in heinous terms by those same-styled traditionalists who can hardly see past the end of their own noses. Indeed, Social Computing (a term meant to include such things as Social Networking, like MySpace) is beginning to transform the way people interact and even transact. It was said that the fax machine and e-mail would never replace "real mail." It hasn't, yet. But with legislation legitimizing electronically authorized contracts, the coming of age of digital fingerprint technology (and other verification methods), it seems that technology has created even more viable ways of transacting authentic business than before. Social Computing is the next logical step in this transformation.

From a purely business perspective, imagine a day when a person can log-on to a Social Computing platform on the web, meet a potential client or customer, hire a lawyer to draft a contract, execute it electronically, and then immediately store the contract and all of the accounting information involved in the financial transaction to a database that is browsable and searchable. This is the future of business, and life itself. Why go through the hassle of even using an online phonebook to find a technology consultant for my (hypothetical) business in California? I can not only meet him online, but read the reviews of people who have used his services and endorsed him professionally, hire him online, and give him electronic access to my database so he can tell me what's going wrong with my system. He can fix it (remotely), issue me a bill, and I can have it automatically paid. That just eliminated 4 hours of my day, my problem is fixed, and I didn't need an administrative assistant to FedEx a check to the guy. I could continue for pages with the possibilities--nay, the eventualities of this market, but I think I have given a good idea of what is coming.

All of this, however, is criticized by those traditionalists lamenting the loss of social interaction. The claim is that Social Networking, and by extrapolation, Social Computing diminishes human interaction. It is this normative claim that I will discuss in a subsequent post.