Discussion Questions
The Evans book was one of the best selling of a spate of
books in the late 1970s about the “microelectronic” revolution and the social
impact of personal computers. The first part, which you aren’t reading, includes
a history of early computing, Babbage, ENIAC, etc. Evans presents the remainder
of his book as the inevitable but accelerated result of this process.
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What does Evans think is driving this “revolution”? What
role does he think society has in directing it? What would Winner say about
this.
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As you read the book, you will notice predicted
technologies of three kinds. Technologies we now take for granted,
technologies that are still some way off, and technologies we tried or could
have but didn’t turn out to want. Make a note of which technologies fall into
each group.
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Evans credits computer aided decision making with “the
imminent emancipation of man from, on the one hand, the rule of the committee,
and, on the other, from the inspired hunch of the autocrat.” How does this
compare with Levy’s description of the effects of the spreadsheet?
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He has some interesting predictions on the future of
money. How far did they get towards coming true? Why is cash still here,
anyway?
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According to page 169, “the robot is about to become both
convenient and sensationally cost effective”. He also predicts massive
shrinkage of the workday, to 4 hours by 1990. Why didn’t things work out this
way?
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Evans makes an argument, very similar to one made today
about China, that new electronic technology would reshape the autocratic
society of the USSR. Do you believe it played a role in the collapse of this
country?
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Winner confronts head-on the claim that access to more
information will make society more democratic, more equal and so on. Is the
Internet working out that way? Does it make sense to talk about a revolution?
Additional Resources
 | The entire idea of a fundamental social revolution and economic sparked by
changing information technology is obviously not something that went away in
the late 1970s. We will be returning to it later, and dozens of 1990s articles
in Wired magazine alone are either elaborating on Evans' themes (generally
unknowingly) or disputing them. |
| There hasn't really been a proper history of the whole late-70s "micro
revolution" thing. But there is quite a good book ( F. Webster, Theories of
the Information Society: Routledge, 1995) about the intellectual side of
it. It became deeply entangled with the concept of a post-industrial society
expressed by Daniel Bell in his 1976 The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society. |
| An Australian internet research company called Carlson Analytics has a
nice guide to all this stuff on its
website. The
guide to the
"digital environment"
is particularly interesting if you want to get a sense for more recent writing
on the same themes. |
|
