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Teaching – Transparency and Information Technology 451

of computers within specific spheres of social life. They were the result of the initial attempts to understand the changes in the economic and social sphere under the impact of the emerging telecommunications and information ex- change innovations. Science formed the basis of these new technological pro- cesses, as shaped in the course of the two previous decades. As a result, com- puters became miniaturized and in 1975, a computer consisting of only a printed circuit was invented. The turning point in the development of scien- tific and technological progress was, nevertheless, in 1981, when the first mass personal computer was invented, thus beginning the informational and technological revolution. Since that, industrial and social processes in the spheres directly connected with information started to develop rapidly. The most important contributions to this new speed included the enhancement of technologies, the miniaturization of equipment, the increase in computer ca- pacity and memory, and the cheapening of electronic devices. Under condi- tions of intense development of global society information and the newest technologies based on it have principally changed both interstate and inter- personal relations, which have become more mobile, more open, more trans- parent and less dependent on distances.

A. N. Chumakov

Technology and Science in Global Perspective: The worldwide scope of social and technological problems is vital. Science and technology, despite their origins embedded within Western political economy and cultural sources, have now become world science and world technology.

In the historically evolved division of labor, technical elites derive their power from specialized competence; they are partially insulated from others and from democratic decision making by a scientific and technological so- phistication, which easily allows for esoteric secrecy (whether military or industrial). These technological threats to human societies are broadly of three sorts: political, social, and ideological.

In the political sphere, the threat due to elitism may outweigh the bene- fits of specialized learning and specialized practice: (1) by undermining the competence of representative democracy or by distorting the procedure of electing representatives; (2) by diverting or frustrating the development of self-management institutions (such as workers’ control in the work place, the market, or other production spaces of societies); (3) by the overriding techno- logical necessity of quick military response to security dangers with the con- sequent and accepted social necessity of hot-line elitism; and (4) by linking populist counter-elitism to neo-Luddism.

Scientific and technological innovations threaten to undermine the re- ceived qualities of cultural life and human consciousness: (1) by challenging the power, validity, and even the presence of the literal and the figurative icons and rites of traditional religious and aesthetic sensitivity in all their forms; (2) by promoting the psychologically symbolical fetishism of science and technol- ogy, or of anti-science and irrationalism; (3) by transforming human living relations through transforming the social relations of production, consumption, and communication; and (4) by transforming the social relations of pleasure and fulfillment, and, in the process, weakening the momentum of cultural tra-

452 Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary

ditions, leaving the individual increasingly without moorings, open prey to the immediacy and irrationality of quick-fix populist manipulation.

Ideologically, technological society poses problems, sets criteria for ex- planations and solutions, provides resources of people and materials, creating and distorting the cognitive culture along with daily life. Technological inno- vations produce their own political economy of culture along with a political economy of science; these are the objects of new work in the social sciences and, in turn, they stimulate critics who then must consider whether science and technology are themselves partial, ideological, and merely instrumental reasoning, whether seen from traditional (largely religious) premises or from humanistic and other viewpoints.

R. S. Cohen

Techno-Optimism: Cory Doctorow defines “techno-optimism” as the belief that technology could be used to make the world worse held at the same time with the hope that it can be steered to make the world better (2011). From this point of view, technical means of production (such as machines, mechanisms, computers, and innovative technologies), and scientific and technical knowledge, are the determinative factor that defines different aspects of social life and the nature and direction of social development.

Interest in technical research can be found in works as early as Aristotle, but the technocratic mood appeared for the first time much later, related to the development of engineering during the Renaissance. Then, during the seven- teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century, as scientific and technological achievements were growing and the industrial revolution was underway, this mood grew stronger and was developed by active followers of scientific and technological advance, such as Francis Bacon, Marquis de Condorcet, Julien Mettrie, Voltaire, and Saint-Simon, who had common views on technology and saw technological advances as the most important means of solving so- cial contradictions and achieving well being for all. At the same time, the opposite mood to techno-optimism emerged. Followers of this ideology were pessimistic about the development of scientific and technological advance.

The best-developed forms of technocratic theories appeared under the influence of impressive scientific and technological achievements in the 1920s. The author of such a theory that became widely known was an Ameri- can economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen who was one of the first to provide a philosophical ground for the leading role of industrial production and technological progress in the development of society. According to him, engineers and technical specialists should govern a modern state, because they are the only kind of people who can develop production in the interests of society (the pathos of T. Veblen’s technocratic theory), and they need po- litical power to achieve this goal.

However, by the beginning of the 1960s, the above views were obscured by a new and even more powerful wave of technocratic and progressive spir- its inspired by an industrial upsurge that involved virtually all economically developed countries of the world in the post-war period. The prospects of social progress in the 1950s–1960s seemed boundless to many people both in the West and in the East. The public mind ever more acquired techno-

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