Randy Connolly Blog

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on Technological Rationality from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

Last class we discussed the essay “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering” and then finished off with perhaps the most well-known dissenting voice towards technology, the Luddites of the early 19th Century. There were of course other dissenting voices towards technological progress throughout that century. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1816), or the modern equivalence, the movie Jurassic Park, was essentally a fable about an out-of-control technology. Shelly’s story is an early warning against something that Lewis Mumford in the 1960s called the Technological Imperative: i.e., if it is technologically possible to make something, then it should be made.

In America there were also dissenting voices. In Melville’s Moby Dick, captain Ahab is often described in mechanistic/technological language. Ahab says “All my means are sane, my motives and my object is made.” Ahab is a story about a man who has become a machine working against a white whale that represents a pre-technological Nature. Melvilles’s work is an early example of a growing unease amongst a minority of thinkers towards the rapidly changing world of the late 19th Century. Perhaps two of the most insightful of these turn of the century dissenters were Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen.

Veblen was an American sociologist and economist whose writings focused on the social development of American-style capitalism. In our reading from The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen argues that the “technological character of the machine process” has an impact outside of the factory or office. Technology and its processes has a “disciplinary effect” on the people using it; it “compels the adaption of the worker to his work.”

The “discipline of the machine industry inculcates in its workers … regularity of sequence and mechanical precision.” That is, it “inculcates thinking in terms of cause and effect to the neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage.”

Thus, for Veblen, efficiency has become the ruling evaluative/normative framework of life inside and outside of the office.

Weber was a German sociologist and economist whose writings focussed on the development and eventual triumph of modern rationality. I’ve given you a selection from the conclusion of his most important and well-read book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This book is still available, is still being read, and is still debated, unlike perhaps Veblen.

In the earlier part of the book, Weber argues that modern capitalism (and thus the modern world) requires a certain way of thinking, a certain way of looking at the world. Weber’s thesis was that this way of thinking developed as a result of the early Protestant/Calvinist/Puritan ethic of predestination. This gloomy theological doctrine insists that since God is all-knowing, He knows and has chosen in advance who will be saved and who will be damned. The somewhat surprising result of the early protestant embrace of presdestination is that it instilled a type of individualism, since believers could gain some self-assurance of their salvation through tireless labour in their profession. According to Weber, Catholics performed good works when needed to assage guilt, Protestants systematically laboured. This ascetic ethic thus favoured the rational pursuit of economic gain (not riches but investments) by these Protestants.

In our reading, Weber concludes his book by noting that with the religious basis of capitalism long gone, all that is left is the machinery of modern capitalism and its way of thinking.

The “modern economic order … is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism … with irresistable force.” It will “determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

What does Veblen and Weber have to say to us today? Recall our definition of technology: that it is not just the things, but the processes, and their system, meaning roughly the type of thinking that technology requires. These two writers are focusing not on the things but on the way of thinking that modern technology requires. Both these writers see humans locked into a way of being as a result of their technology. Both see technology imposing a way of thinking.

Courses, History, Technology

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on American Progress from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

As mentioned in a previous class, one of the ways that I am organizing the section on “Thinking About Technology” is by categorizing it into four subsections that describe four common narratives on technology. They are: progress, convenience, determinism, and control.

Today, I want to talk about progress. In western culture (and especially in the United States), technology = progress, and vice versa in that someone who opposes a technology is often characterized as being opposed to progress in general.

But what is progress? At its simplest it refers to moving forward. More specifically for us, it is a belief that something improves over time.

However, this is by no means the only way to think about time. Some (older) cultures see time cyclically or if they do envisage time linearly, they might see time as a descent.

Prior to the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), it was much more common to think of time as a descent in quality from the ancient world. Alternately, it was/is also common to think of time as a series of rise and falls. This latter belief is wonderfully encapsulated by Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series of paintings, which show the rise and fall of a civilization.

But throughout the Enlightenment (which refers to a phase in western philosophy and culture life in which reason and science became progressively prioritized over tradition and religion as arbitrar of truth or knowledge), progress in science and knowledge was gradually believed to be main means to achieving social progress. This belief is wonderfully captured in Joseph Wright’s painting Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, in which the light of science actually illuminates/enlightens the children (the future), the bourgeoisie, and the working class/servants.

By the 19th century, the idea that history was a progression to a higher state had become one of the key ideas of western culture. Comte, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Spencer were some of the key intellectual figures in this movement.

This belief in progress was an absolutely vital aspect of American culture from the 1850s to 1950s. In particular, the type of progress that was valorized during this time period in America was technological progress. This can be seen quite clearly in the popular art of this time, such as Currier and Ives lithograph Across the Continent or John Gast’s American Progress painting. In these works, technological progress (the train, the telegraph) are moving westward, bringing civilized settlements and education, as well as banishing unruly nature and natives to a past of the setting sun.

The newly emergent capitalist class were especially drawn to the belief that progress is equal to social progress. Why?

Recall that from the 1780s-1890s, the USA and Western Europe experienced dramatic growth in economic individualism and an expansion of an urban-based workforce. The new 19th Century middle and upper class were not rich from owning land but from their control over new technologies. These technologies made available new material goods; their message to the public at this time was that these new goods were in fact the definition of progress.

By the turn of the 20th Century, technological progress had become an end in itself.

Courses, History, Presentations

This summer and fall I’ve been doing some contract programming work in Windows Forms on the side. One of the most enjoyable parts of this particular contract has been working with both the Compact .NET Framework as well as Microsoft’s Virtual Earth control. In one part of this particular contract, I’ve been creating a Windows Forms application that needs to allow a user to display and edit GPS coordinates of house addresses. To do so, I used the Windows Form’s WebBrowser control, and then programmatically loaded an HTML document that contained the Javascript for displaying the appropriate map as well as markers for the original GPS coordinates. The slick part of this whole process is that you can send messages back and forth between the C# Windows Forms container and the Javascript in the document being displayed within the embedded browser.

At any rate, I’ve included a few sample screenshots to illustrate how it turned out.

Programming, Work

This July my family and I flew down to Florida to stay with my sister-in-law a few hours south of Tampa Bay. Beside the obligatory trip to Disney World, we passed the time hanging out at one of the local beaches.

Family, Travel

My oldest son Alex’s U14 Tier 2 outdoor soccer team won a bronze medal at the Canada Day Tournament in Kelowna, BC. He had a great game (he plays as an outside midfielder), and was awarded the game’s MVP by the opposition’s coach.

Family, Soccer

My youngest son Benjamin recently had his yearly piano recital. This year his he played a piece from the Lord of the Rings movie soundtrack, as well as a piece called Monkeys in a Tree, by Boris Berlin. This is part of the Royal Conservatory Level 2 repertoire.

Family, Music

I recently gave a talk to students at Western Canada High School about careers in computing. Like most IT-related programs, our Computer Information Systems applied degree has seen a massive decrease in numbers since 2001. These low enrollments have never really picked up, even though the job market for our graduates in Calgary is phenomenal. I put together this presentation in the hopes of attracting a few more students into our program.

I tried a new approach with this presentation. I wanted to make it visually more punchy and not look like the typical PowerPoint presentation. I’ve included a few captures of some sample slides from the presentation.

The complete presentation is available below. You are free to use it, but please do not re-distribute it or re-post it.

high school session 2007 march.pdf (2.00 mb)

Presentations, Teaching

My son’s U14 Tier 2 indoor soccer team won a gold medal in the Slush Cup up in Edmonton, Alberta. The gold medal game was a tight contest and it went to a penalty shoot-out. My son Alex was selected to take the fifth and final shot. As it turned out, when his turn came, each team has scored 3 goals each. His team got to shoot last, so he potentially could win the Gold for his team if he scored. I don’t think I will ever forget the look of happy panic he gave me just before he headed out to take the kick.

As it turned out, he scored off the post. I’ll also never forget the look of pure happiness on his face after that goal …

Family, Soccer

Just in time for my birthday, I’ve received my first copies of my book, Core Internet Application Development with ASP.NET 2.0, published by Prentice Hall. After all the unrelenting work of writing the book from Oct-05 to Aug-06, and the slower and time-consuming process of editing it from Sep-06 to Dec-06, it was somewhat unreal to actually see the finished product in my hands. It was a great moment, and yet I felt somewhat distant from it all.

My department chair Bill Paterson and the Pearson Ed book rep Shannon Bailey arranged a nice reception at the College for the book, with a cake and free copies of the book for my department colleagues. Thanks you two!

ASP.NET, Books, Writing

I’m back from the 2007 Microsoft Academic Game Days in Computer Science Education. This was certainly the most enjoyable conference I’ve ever attended. The first morning of the conference was in Orlando; the remainder was aboard a Disney Cruise Ship travelling to the Bahamas and back. I was delivering a paper (one of twenty selected) so Microsoft paid for my airfare and accommodation.

The main focus of the conference was not on the academics but more on convincing the academics on using Microsoft technology in their courses. In particular, they were really pushing the new XNA Framework.

Nonetheless, the conference was a lot of fun. Initially, I was a little worried as I found out that I had to share a room with another conference participant. It actually worked out quite well as my room-mate, Greg Wadley, was an interesting professor from University of Melbourne, and was also delivering a paper.

The great thing about having a conference aboard a cruise ship is that you could almost always find someone to talk with. In a regular multi-day conference, at the end of the day, everyone disappears (to their hotels, to bars, to parties, to sightsee). But aboard the ship, there weren’t a lot of places for the conference participants to disappear.

At any rate, the ship travelled first to Nassau, where we had two or three hours to explore. The next morning we arrived at Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas. Unfortunately, most of the academic papers (including my own) were scheduled for this day, so I was only about to spend about three hours enjoying the sea and sun.

Research, Travel