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| BEYOND ENGINEERING
Author Robert Pool explains how society shapes technology. March 6, 1998 |
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NewsHour Backgrounders
February 13, 1998
A David Gergen Dialogue with Robert Pool.
January 27, 1998
The Future of Cars.
January 23, 1998
Retraining displaced American workers for High-tech jobs.
January 14,1998
New computer chips are faster. How much better are they?
January 18, 1996
What determines which technologies succeed and which fail?
Browse the NewsHour's coverage of cyberspace
and more David Gergen dialogues.
For anyone out there who bought Beta instead of VHS, feel vindicated.
It wasn't really a poor choice. When the two videocassette recorder formats first came on the market in the 1970s, both held almost equal shares of the market. The experts even argued that Betamax was a superior machine. Who knew that something called "increasing returns" would eventually push the VHS format out in front and render the poor Beta machine as obsolete as an 8-track cassette or New Coke.
The fate of the Beta machine is just one example Robert Pool uses in his new book "Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology." In it, Pool challenges the traditional idea that scientists and engineers decide which machines become staples of everyday life. Instead he argues that a variety of human factors-- from market forces to human psychology-- determine which machines which become household items.
Take the Betamax machine as an example: when the VHS recorder gained a small advantage in the market, stores began stocking more VHS cassettes. This prompted more people to buy VHS machines, which convinced stores to stock even more VHS cassettes. In this way, increasing returns guaranteed that the VHS format, and not the Beta, came to sit on top of TVs across the country.
Pool's book throws the history of technology and innovation into a whole new light. But what does Pool's theory mean for the future of technology? Will scientists and engineers begin to design technology with the end users in mind? How will this impact the growth of new technologies?
Robert Pool will answer your questions on his book and the past and future of technology.
Kevin Gilleland of Raieigh, NC asks:
Has there been any research done on "change" and how the psychological issues surrounding change affect people's acceptance of new technologies?
Robert Pool responds:
As far as I know, there has been little formal study of how personal attitudes toward change affect acceptance of new technologies, but we do know a few things about this. For example, those individuals who are least comfortable with change in any form -- moving to a new city, trying unfamiliar foods, getting a new hairstyle -- are most likely to resist innovation. There are still some writers who use typewriters instead of computers because that's what they learned to write on and that's what they're comfortable with. And it's no accident that the people who accept new technologies most quickly are the young. They don't have thirty years of experience doing things one particular way, and constitutionally they are more interested in trying and learning new things. So it's no surprise, for instance, that most of the people taking full advantage of the Internet are under 30. Older people may not be resisting it as such, but neither are they diving in with abandon like much of the young crowd.
On the filp side, the technologies that seem most different and demand the most getting used to will inevitably meet with more resistance than those that are easy to adapt to.
When you look at groups of people instead of individuals, attitudes toward change become a much more powerful factor in shaping attitudes toward technological innovation. In the book, "Risk and Culture," Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky analyze how radical groups in the environmental and anti-nuclear movements saw technology-driven change as an affront to nature and thus something to be resisted at any cost. And people who study businesses find that organizational culture and attitudes toward change shape how a company responds to new technologies. The companies at the forefront of today's technological revolutions -- Microsoft, for instance, or almost any of the small startups in the computer industry -- embrace change and are looking actively for the next breakthrough.
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The Online NewsHour asks:
You mentioned to David Gergen that technology is increasingly designed with its end-users in mind. In this light, do you see fewer products now that are technologically superior but have failed because of human factors?
Robert Pool responds:
It's really too early to tell. The trend toward human-factors engineering has only become widespread in the past 10 years or so, and there are still many products designed and built without much attention paid to the demands they place upon the users. And the technologies in which this human-factors engineering are most important -- commercial aircraft, chemical plants, nuclear plants, air-traffic control, and so on -- tend to be expensive, long-lifetime products which don't get much retrofitting. The new nuclear plants being built in the Far East have control rooms designed with the plant controllers in mind (unlike, say, the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in 1979), but for the most part nuclear plants in the United States, having been designed in the 1960s and 1970s, have controls that place far greater demands on the people running the plants than is necessary. In the long run, though, perhaps over the next 30 or 40 years, we can expect to see fewer technologies performing badly and having accidents because of "operator error" that is really due more to the designers expect more from the operator than was reasonable.
It will likely take even longer for engineers to design -- and companies to build -- technologies that take into account organizational factors as well as human factors. As sociologist Charles Perrow and others have noted, technologies such as nuclear plants place great strains on the organizations that run them, demanding both that the organization have a strong hierarchical structure with carefully spelled-out rules of operations, and also be set up so that they can respond quickly and flexibly to unexpected situations. These conflicting organizational demands, Perrow argues, make accidents inevitable for such technologies. In response, the Berkeley sociologist Todd La Porte has suggested that it may be possible to design nuclear plants differently to take into account the limits of the organizations running them as well as of the individuals in the control rooms. I suspect that this will indeed happen, but not anytime soon.
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John W. Childress of Lewisburg, TN asks:
I am wondering if "society shapes technology" is an appropriate subtitle to your book. When Bill Gates manipulates the market to replace superior products with his own, is that "society" or Bill Gates at work?
Robert Pool responds:
Good point. In my subtitle, "society" is meant to include anything having to do with people, either in groups or as individuals, but that's not clear until you read the book. History is full of examples where an individual has shaped technology profoundly, and not just through his rational, technical judgments, but through his vision, his passions, his guesses, his biases, and his mistakes. Henry Ford did, as did Hyman Rickover. And even today, when the tendency is to see technology as a group effort in which individuals are mostly interchangeable, people like Gates do have profound influence.
I do want to emphasize, however, that you cannot simply look at the actions of individuals and forget about groups. Organizations and groups tend to take on characteristics, desires and agendas that are more than the sum of the individuals making them up. You can see this quite well in Gates's current fight with the Justice Department over his Internet browser. Reading the media accounts, it's clear that the organizational culture at Microsoft has played a large role in the company's pugnacious attitude toward those who are trying to keep it from leveraging its Windows operating-system monopoly into a monopoly in the Internet browser market. This is more than just Bill Gates -- it is a whole company with an us-versus-them mentality. On the other side, the Justice Department's culture is just as clearly playing a role. And the outcome of this fight will almost certainly determine the sort of browser technology we have in five or 10 years.
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Jeffrey P. Brown of Omaha, NE asks:
Just as VHS took over Beta due to increasing returns-- would there be wisdom in polling end-users on new technological ideas?
Robert Pool responds:
Unfortunately, the best polling system we have is the free market, and, as you point out, it can lock into an inferior technological choice, as was the case with VHS. Companies developing new technologies do a certain amount of polling with the consumer-acceptance studies, but they're not really interested in finding the best technology; they're interested in making money. If they believe that customers will buy their product, they'll bring it to market even if it may be inferior to something else out there. Certainly the companies that made the VHS machines were not about to withdraw from the market if a consumer poll found that, given the choice, people liked the Beta format somewhat better. If anything, the companies would have tried to beat Beta to market to get a head-start that Beta couldn't overcome (which is what did happen).
Given this situation, the tendency is to look to the government for help. Perhaps some agency can determine the best direction for a new technology and push it that way. But the government does a poor job of picking technological winners and losers, as has become apparent in Asia, where the governments often decide which technologies to invest in. Ten years ago everyone thought this sort of government-directed technological choice was the wave of the future, but Japan has been in a slump since 1990 and other previously robust economies are in even worse shape.
Government may be able to improve technological choice in a couple of ways. First, it can fund research very early in the development of a technology which is aimed at building up a knowledge base so that the developers of a technology have as much information as possible to work with. This is particularly important for technologies that need a great deal of basic scientific and engineering research -- solar power comes to mind -- but it wouldn't have helped in the Beta-vs-VHS competition. The second thing government can do is to make sure that technological decisions are not made artificially early. In essence, this is what the Justice Department is trying to do with Microsoft: if Microsoft is allowed to package its Internet browser with every copy of Windows and thus put it on practically every new PC that is sold today, it would give Internet Explorer a tremendous, perhaps unbeatable, advantage over Netscape. Then the market would make a decision -- for Microsoft's product -- that was based not on which browser consumers preferred but on other considerations altogether. Perhaps Internet Explorer would win anyway. But what I understand the Justice Department to be saying is: "Let's have a fair competition between the two, not one decided by the fact that one browser is sold by the company that makes Windows and the other is not."
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Kainam Thomas Wong of Glendale, CA asks:
As American popular culture is widely accepted in major cosmopolitan centers around most parts of the world, would this quasi-universality of American culture give American technology a competitive edge over its Asian or even West European competition?
Robert Pool responds:
I don't think so. American music is popular around the world, but even in this country we listen to our CDs on players made in Japan. As nearly as I can tell, there is actually very little effect that popular culture has on technology except in the area of consumer goods, and those are mass-produced items that can be produced anywhere.
There are parts of American culture that give us a technological advantage, but they run deeper than popular culture. It was no accident, for example, that the personal computer originated here in the country that values individual freedom and power more than any other. In general, we have an advantage in the development of technologies that depend on individual effort, risk-taking, and vision that disagrees with the current consensus; much of what is happening on the Internet is a good example. We are at a disadvantage in technological development that demands long-term planning and cooperation and coordination between various groups; witness how the American automobile industry fell so far behind that of Japan's and only recovered by learning to do things as the Japanese do.
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