Culture, Sustainability, and Information Infrastructure: A Case Study in Earth Systems Engineering and Management

摘要

It is important to begin any broad discussion of the information society, and the information infrastructure underlying it, with appropriate humility: understanding the social, environmental and cultural impacts of information infrastructure, the services it enables, and the cultural changes it will entail, is far beyond our current capacity. In part, this is due to basic human psychology: we are able to conceptualize the future only in terms of the past. Where, as here, the changes introduced by the technology system are likely to be so profound as to be for all practical purposes discontinuous, the compass of the past simply fails. Another reason arises from the nature of the technology itself, and that is the profound contingency of the evolution of complex technological systems, especially those, such as the information industry taken as a whole, which heavily influence, and are influenced, by their economic and cultural context. Moreover, culture is simply transmitted information, and any technology that so profoundly affects information stocks and flows will inevitably have unpredictable cultural effects as well. This was true of the printing press; it was true of the telegraph and first radio systems; it was true of television (the first truly postmodern medium) - and it will certainly be true of the current explosion of information technology in all its variety. Finally, there is the important point that information, and information infrastructures, are quintessentially human systems, and as such inevitably affected with the reflexivity and contingency of human individuals and systems. History is not predictable a priori because it is the story of autonomous moral agents; and neither, at this point, are the implications of the information revolution. We will know it when we have lived it.