ODR: Enabling New Communities and Institutions

While users generally explore new technologies such as ODR and eNegotiation systems for their applicability to their needs, what is often disregarded is the way those new technologies transform their users and the user environment. As a number of social scientists and philosophers have explored over the last sixty years, technology also transforms users in specific ways with significant long term implications for humanity as a whole. This raises significant questions about the way digital technologies, especially ODR and eNegotiations systems, are transforming human existence. In this discussion forum we will be speculating on the meaning of the current technology for human existence in the near future. The specific focus will be the emergence of new communities and institutions, but don’t worry if your thoughts slide off into other areas. I think that in this forum we can risk asking some of the big questions. Communities and institutions are always emerging in relation to new technologies,  but those might not be the most important impacts as we explore.  

In order to get us started in thinking the big questions I have identified four major perspectives on technological change that have emerged in the literature over the last sixty years. Clearly the implications of technological change are profound, and these four perspectives give us some sense of just how profound.

The idea that technology shapes humanity first emerged as a significant idea in the work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger , in the late 1940s. Heidegger argued that technology enframes human existence, and that subsequent to every new technology human thinking expands to think in terms enabled by the technology. He thought that human beings integrated technological capabilities into their self-understanding, for example thinking of a day’s travel in global terms rather than local terms after the invention of cheap international air travel. The new technological capability was very quickly understood as a human norm for behaviour.

The French philosopher, Jacques Ellul,  quickly grasped the negative possibilities in Heidegger’s insight and noted that not only does technology open avenues of human thinking, it also decisively closes other possibilities. For example, nuclear energy might mean widespread and cheap electrical power, but it also requires a massive state security apparatus in order to keep reactors operating safely and free of terrorist threats. Human freedom will never be the same in the world of nuclear power that it was in a world without nuclear energy. A cloud of radiation now hovers over humanity, restricting every activity, bringing with it massive surveillance and police operations.

In the 1980s the American social scientist, Donna Haraway, developed quite a different perspective in her article, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway notes that in the contemporary world the line between human and machine is blurring as we integrate cybernetic technologies into every aspect of human existence.  For Haraway this radically shifts the meaning of human identity as we converse regularly with people 1000 km away and never talk to the neighbour next door.  What then is the meaning of human community? Or is Cyber-sex sex? And if so, then what is sex? Clearly the relational and biological nature of human existence has been significantly transformed by technology.

The English archeologist, Timothy Thomas, places Haraway’s insight into another connection when he draws attention to the way technology and human existence co-evolve. Over the millennia every major shift in technology has been accompanied by a corresponding shift in the biological nature of human existence. As he notes, average human brain size has been dropping for 30,000 years, the consequence of agricultural techonology. Currently medical technology makes it possible for many human beings to continue to live (and reproduce) who would otherwise have died and been left out of the gene pool, and thus humanity becomes biologically weaker while human diversity expands. Human diversity, in turn, leads to an expansion in the types and uses of technology, a process of mutual effect that never ends. The human future, according to Thomas, is one of increasing integration of human beings and machines.

In light of these analyses it seems appropriate that we explore the question of human transformation that our new cyber-technologies are creating. Human beings are changing due to the technologies we are developing and implementing. What are those directions of change? What will happen in the future due to the tools we have created? I invite you to ponder these questions and respond. Let’s see what we can think about how we can not only use our technologies to accomplish new things, but how those technologies change the human species in perception, action, and bodily existence.In particular,

• What new institutions do you see arising?
• What new communities will grow?
• How will those new institutions and communities arise out of ODR and eNegotiation technologies?
• What will they do to the rest of humanity in consequence?

References:
 

Heidegger, Martin. (1976). The Question Concerning Technology. Basic Writings, pp. 283-317. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Ellul, Jacques. (1964). The Technological Society. New York: Knopf.
Haraway, Donna. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149-181. New York: Routledge.
Thomas, Timothy. (2010). The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Moderated By:

Bruce Hiebert

Dr. Hiebert is the Vice-President for Applications and Ethics at iCan Systems Inc., the developers of the Smartsettle suite of eNegotiation software. He develops implementation processes that enable specific user groups to effective apply eNegotiation tools to standard and on-line business practices. Dr. Hiebert is also a professor of Business Ethics for University Canada West in Vancouver, BC, Canada.  He is the author of Your Soul at Work: How to live your values in the Workplace (Northstone, 2005) and regularly presents papers exploring the relationship of human organizations and human values. He can be reached at bh@smartsettle.com

______________________________________________

 
Return to Cyberweek 2011 Homepage