Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
perceptions, but also fit for the new realities of a restructured
capitalism. But this was not simply a technological development,
in which a need was perceived and the solution to its fulfilment sup-
plied. Instead it was the result of the coming together of a number
of elements, both cultural and technological. These included an
understanding of the possibilities of digital technology arising out
of military-funded research, including real-time, graphical comput-
ing and networking, as well as the tendency, inspired also by military
needs, towards miniaturization, which in turn enabled the develop-
ment of cheaper, smaller computers. The problem was that such
developments were firmly embedded in the technocratic, cybernetic
context of Cold War computing, which, in the light of the use of
computers in the Vietnam War, was a target of opprobrium for many
of those opposing the status quo. An effective shift in the paradigm
through which computers were perceived required cultural trans-
formations as much as technological ones.
This shift was accomplished through a number of different,
though connected, developments. One was the set of adjustments
and changes in the information discourses that had emerged after
the War, which re-oriented them in directions appropriate for new
ways of thinking. These included the emergence of 'second order'
Cybernetics and of the beginnings of new discourses such as
Complexity and Artificial Life in the late
s. At the same time
new and positive conceptions of technology were being articulated,
by, among others, those involved in the avant-garde, as well as
the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and the architect and vision-
ary Buckminster Fuller. Finally there were the circumstances that
brought these disparate elements together, in particular the coinci-
dental proximity of one of the centres of the micro-electronics
industry, Silicon Valley in Northern California, to San Francisco, a
little further to the north, which had itself become, by the late
1960
1960
s,
a centre of the counter-culture.
