While both Castells and Urry explicitly distance themselves from a technologically determinist stance, they do not entirely succeed. At times they have a tendency to discuss the impact of electronic information systems as having major “irreversible” efects, ushering in disruptive social revolutions. The idea that technical innovation is the most important cause of social change permeates Castells’s analysis of the network society. Reflecting a common tendency in the literature on digital technologies, he argues from extremes, assuming that technologies are used in a uniform way overall and everywhere, revolutionizing work, leisure, education, family relationships, and personal identities.
Ironically, this is a form of technological determinism that sufers from a lack of interest in technology, what it is really made up of, what it consists of, and so on. What I am trying to show in this chapter is that it is precisely by focusing on technology that we can see how technology is implicated in social relations, human interests, history, and culture.
Such commentaries frame the present era as one in which the world is experiencing historically unprecedented change. Yet even a cursory glance at earlier periods of rapid technological change reveals that similar claims were made about their overpowering efects. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Anglo American culture was fascinated by the capacities of the telegraph and telephone to extend messages efortlessly and instantaneously, annihilating space with time. Indeed, the idea that inventors were ahead of their time and that science and technology were advancing faster than the ability of human society to cope was commonplace. As the next chapter expounds, a sense of increasing speed or acceleration has been a central feature of social commentaries since at least the nineteenth century.
Furthermore, detailed histories of technology immediately suggest that technologies have divergent efects, operating in diferent ways for diferent people at diferent periods in history. What Carolyn Marvin terms instrument-centered perspectives, in which the instrument determines the efect, are much too narrow, because even the history of electronic technologies
Hig h-Speed Society
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