According to Langdon Winner, a scholar of technology whose writings (including Autonomous Technology) I admire, the secondary consequences and impacts of technological change are often far more significant than the results thought to be "primary" at the time.
During the Industrial Revolution, for example, many thousands of instrumental and technological changes were introduced - new ways of finding fuel, making textiles, powering locomotives. But, argues Winner in an essay called "Artifact/Ideas and Political Culture" published in 1997 in Albert Teich's Technology and the Future, those aren't the things that made the Industrial Revolution so important in human history.
"What matters," Winner writes, "is that a whole new kind of society was created. The truly enduring part of that revolution, the truly significant aspect is the multiplicity of relationships between people and between humans and technology we call Industrial Society, results many of which arose largely as so-called 'secondary' consequences of technological change."
The gurus, pundits, and prophets of the digital age, many of whom have been published in Wired magazine, fervently believed that the Internet and the Web would transform society. Many of them suggested that these changes would be utopian in scope, wiping away poverty, as well as corrupt and inefficient political, media, and economic institutions and models, and replacing them with a civil, rational, and more humane and prosperous society.
Cyber writers are far less idealistic about digital culture these days, and for good reason. In the reign of Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr, our political and media institutions appear to be ever more noxious, corrupt, and remote, and corporation after corporation has come thundering into cyberspace very much untransformed. Far from corporations, media, and government being changed by the Net, the question now is whether the Net we know can possibly survive these forces.
Every now and then an event occurs that reminds us that groundbreaking things are, in fact, happening under our noses, causing us to sit up like deer in a meadow and sniff the wind, suddenly alert to one of Winner's "secondary" transformative ripples.
Recently, a small start-up company in Connecticut, Priceline of Stamford, was awarded a broad patent by the US government after the company convinced the patent office that it had - using digital technology - invented a new way of doing business that was fundamentally different from any other form of commerce in existence today.
The Priceline patent is the first awarded since the United States Court of Appeals, Fourth District of Columbia Circuit affirmed last month that a "practical application of a mathematical algorithm, formula or calculation" could be recognized, and thus protected from competitors.
Priceline's patent award is expected to touch off a stampede of similar applications as corporations exploring new ways to make money via the Net seek similar protection and recognition. This is enormously significant, as patent awards would ratify innovation and potentially make it vastly more profitable.
In the Priceline system consumers submit an electronic bid, called a "conditional purchase offer," to buy goods or services - airline tickets or automobiles - from unknown sellers at a fixed price. They guarantee their offer with a credit card number. Priceline then takes responsibility for presenting these offers to sellers anywhere in the country or the world. The sellers can accept or reject the offers, depending on the availability of their products. (There are, for example, an estimated 500,000 empty airline seats flying each day, and many Americans who want to fly cheaply.)
If you want to fly from New York City to Chicago on a given day, you can contact Priceline and set certain conditions - the number of layovers, the total flight not to exceed a certain length of time, the cost of the ticket not to exceed a certain price.
The airlines, using their own computerized ticket and reservations systems, can check out the offers. The first company that responds and meets all of the buyer's conditions gets the sale. Essentially, computers negotiate with computers to match what potential flyers want with the seats airlines might have to offer.
Priceline, which recently expanded this notion to car purchases in the New York City area, does most of its business on the Web, but obviously it could use other electronic technologies as well, including email, voicemail, or faxes. The company makes money from service fees on its purchasing transactions. But with the patent grant, it expects to make most of its money by licensing its electronic methods to other electronic commerce companies.
Priceline officials have said they plan eventually to expand online product lines to hotel rooms, credit cards, computers, home mortgages, life insurance, and vacation packages.
Priceline's scheme clearly suggests one of Winner's "secondary" impacts of technology on society.
Most people have relatively few choices when they want to buy an expensive airline ticket, a car, or a refrigerator. They can go to one of a number of nearby stores, compare prices, and decide what to buy.
Now they have the option of choosing a price and giving countless vendors the chance to bid. For better or worse, this could transform the way we think of shopping, as well as the way in which we do it. Conceivably, it could alter the nature and balance of power between vendors and consumers, and restructure long-standing capitalistic business and sales traditions. This new business model appears to have the potential to give enormous new powers to people who want to buy things, since their price is being offered to many thousands, even millions, of possible sellers.
Much of our political and media culture is still mired in musty notions of the Internet as a dangerous and decivilizing zone, in which legions of Net-addicted zombies steal our credit cards, bombard our children with dirty pictures, and break into Pentagon computers in order to start World War III.
They are missing one of the biggest stories of modern times. Before our eyes, and in narrow but expanding ways, the nature of society is beginning to be transformed.
A new political world is always embodied in the tools and instruments of modern technology, argues Winner.
Winner goes on to say, "The technological world is filled with artifact/ideas of great consequence for modern political culture. Things often speak louder than words. Among the many ideas present in the structure of contemporary technological devices and systems are the following:
Power is centralized.
The few talk and the many listen.
There are barriers between social classes.
The world is hierarchically structured.
The good things are distributed unequally.
Women and men have different kinds of competence.
One's life is open to continual inspection."
How strange that a little-known start-up company in Connecticut hustling cars and airplane tickets, using new technology to come up with a new way for connecting buyers and sellers of things would serve as so striking an emblem for the tantalizing notion that at least some of the ideas listed above are already beginning to change.
How is technology changing your world view?
What's so scary about the V-Chip?
