Читать книгу Digital Universe - Peter B. Seel - Страница 18

Technological Determinism is a point of view that a society’s technology determines its history, social structure, and cultural values. It is a term that is used to criticize those who credit technology as a central governing force behind social and cultural change as overly “reductionist.” Author Thomas Friedman, in his book The World is Flat, freely admits to being a technological determinist, stating that “capabilities create intentions” in regard to the role that technology plays in shaping how we live.¹⁵ Examples he cites are the internet facilitating global e-commerce, and work-flow technologies (and the internet) making possible the off-shoring and out-sourcing of disaggregated tasks around the world. Friedman states:

The history of economic development teaches this over and over: If you can do it, you must do it, otherwise your competitors will (and) … there is a whole new universe of things that companies, countries, and individuals can and must do to thrive in a flat world.¹⁶

It is rare to find an observer of modern life willing to go on record in this regard, and I commend Friedman’s courage in doing so. His perspective is worth our critical consideration. While it is clear that a wide range of factors influence social change, including culture, economics, and politics, among many others, Friedman advances technology to a privileged position due to its ubiquity in contemporary life and he is correct in his assessment that “capabilities create intentions.” The development of the MP3 compression format for music files makes a good case study. When recorded music was only available on vinyl records, there were few options available for copying songs. As technology evolved, one could make a cassette tape of a record, but the copy was of poor quality and one had to fast forward and rewind the tape to find a desired song. Once digital technology appeared with the advent of music on compact discs, users could “rip” individual songs onto a computer’s hard drive as digital files.

Copyright holders such as record companies and musicians were not immediately concerned since users had to buy the CD to copy the music. However, with the rapid spread of the MP3 file format¹⁷ users of this technology developed large libraries of songs in this format. It wasn’t long until a company, Napster, developed a unique technology for users of their service to copy music files to their own computer from another user who had the desired songs. Then another user could copy it to their computer, and so on. By the time the recording industry sued to shut down Napster and similar services, the genie – and much of the music – were out of the bottle. Without the widespread adoption of the MP3 digital file format and the development of successful peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology, music piracy would not have been as simple and easy to accomplish.

The legal system and related government legislation are almost universally reactive to technological innovation. Digital technology industries are developing innovations at speeds linked to Moore’s law, and the legal system struggles unsuccessfully to keep pace. Despite court decisions that shut down Napster (until it adopted a fee-for-music model) and similar P2P services, global music industry sales declined to $10 billion by 2008, from a peak of $14.5 billion in 1999.¹⁸

However, what technology taketh away, it can restore. By 2018, the global music industry revenue had recovered to an all-time high of $19.1 billion. The savior was digital streaming technology, the source of $11.2 billion of that revenue, up 21 percent from 2017.¹⁹ The advent of smart speakers operating from internet cloud-based services such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home services (along with their AI-driven virtual servants Alexa and Google Assistant) made it possible to simply verbally request the music you would like to hear. Why buy CDs if you can listen to thousands of diverse artists and genres in the home or workplace as a bonus with an annual fee-based service such as Amazon Prime? As Friedman noted above, capabilities create intentions.