In his essay, Geoff Walsham discusses the potential benefits and harms of IT and globalization. Will it be a force for good or ill? These kinds of all or nothing discussions are more harmful than helpful to the conversation about what sort of future IT and development will bring us and therefore what Information Systems (IS) as an academic field can do. Essentially, my belief is that the fundamental desire to be more comfortable and have more opportunities are what drive progress and that this drive overwhelms, eventually, any desire for stability and tradition. When progress happens, different groups are affected differently, but the constant remains that the impacts of technology should be viewed through a class-based prism, because the wealthy will take care of themselves and the poor will adapt as best they can to the change.
What drives IT? Money. Money is considered a reasonable substitute or medium of barter for comfort and opportunities, and so people pursue business ends for money. In their personal lives, they pursue comfort and opportunities through objects and possessions. Home appliances make housework easier. A larger house is more comfortable and offers more opportunities for using it in different ways. What most people strive for is a middle class outcome. A stable homelife, income, and opportunity for their offspring. From the middle class come the values that are anathema to radical change: stability. Middle class values, while maybe not opposed to technological progress, especially at the individual level, are opposed to radical change in society. The poor have no choice, but to change. Change is inspired and pushed by the richest in the world, whether they be your next door neighbor or someone halfway across the world. Walsham’s perspective is one of what will happen to the world. I think this is a mistaken perspective. It should be what will the wealthy sell to the middle class that will cause a change for the world’s poorest. What will happen to those who don't own the world? Things that happen to the world’s richest will never fall out of a tight band of comfort, convenience, improvement, and safety. For others, however, is what we should be worried about.
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The commonality among technological developments has been: being able to get their faster, communicate faster and cheaper, and extending and improving the opportunities available to us. This will continue into the future. No matter what specific devices are invented, they will be put to the purpose of increasing comfort and opportunity for some while others will feel the effects of the invention. I think that what will happen across the world in regards to globalization is that national, ethnic, lingual barriers will break down in the face of class barriers. The rich in each country will have more in common with each other than they will with their own countrymen. What class you were raised in, where you went to school and those inter-relationships will shape people more than what country they grew up in, what language they speak at home or what they look like. The more there is movement between classes within a lifetime or within one or two generations, the better human development will be for everyone, because it will even out the nastiness that classes can condemn other class to.
Technology will not inherently help or hurt the structure of human class. It will be used by the upper classes and will be adapted to or ignored by the lower classes. Technology also does not inherently reinforce or upend the ossification of social classes. As certain technologies begin to be used by forces to upend the current power structure, they will be targeted for castration, ghettoization, or elimination. Wiki leaks is one example of an organization that has been targeted by power structures in order to castrate it. Even the national press in the US, who should look to Wikileaks as an example are quick to side with their powerful peers in the military and government in condemning it. Peer to Peer sharing networks are another example.
Most people are seeking to rise to or remain in a middle class status. Middle class values tend to be values for preserving the current stability. This is because middle class people don’t tend to fight with any vigor. The lower classes will fight with vigor because they take great risks because their situation is so desperate. The rich can fight with vigor because they have the resources to do so. The middle class can affect changes at the margins, but their first purpose will be to improve their own comfort and opportunities.
The distribution of the population among the classes will not be determined by technology. Rather, it will be shaped by much larger events like war, birth rates, and disease. These things are impacted by technology, but they are more determined by the randomness of the world, like the random spread of disease, or the interactions between world leaders. I feel that Walsham misses the broad, mono-directionality of technological change while missing the underlying fact that inequality and the differences between classes doesn’t change in human history. Therefore, his essay is not very helpful when trying to think about technology and human development.