How 1970s Counterculture Has Influenced Technology

This post is inspired by Lee Worden’s article “Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now”. Worden says the counterculture of the 1970s gave rise to the movements that have since spawned Google, WikiLeaks and Wired Magazine. Worden describes these movements as both idealist and libertarian.

What do these technology movements believe? Worden identified four central threads.

1. Belief that access to tools is empowering on its own
2. Rejection of bureaucratic systems in favor of new options
3. Creation of flexible social structures to accomplish goals
4. Idealization of individual freedom

Like futuristic technology, lava lamps were also idealized in the 1970s.

Peter Taylor, a professor at University of Massachusetts-Boston, has diagrammed the trends in the article.

I’m somewhat critical of the four assumptions above, even though I can see their value.

Does Access to Technology Solve Problems?

Access to tools alone doesn’t create the social outcomes communities may desire. I’ve seen examples of this in the nonprofit world and in K-12 education. If technology isn’t seen as relevant, practical and useful, a community may not respond positively to it.

Sometimes, poorly designed or misapplied technology can be confusing or even destructive. When I was in engineering school, there was a joke circulating which said the Ph.D. exam for mechanical engineers involved being locked in a room with a saber-toothed tiger, a disassembled gun, and a user’s manual written in Swahili. Not every technological solution is a useful one.

Should Crowd-Sourcing Replace Paid Work?

Creating flexible social structures can have both advantages and disadvantages. Many of these organizations rely on volunteer labor. Their volunteers work within structured institutions during the day and then spend their free time on these other projects. One could argue that citizen journalists are not being paid adequately for their time.

To what extent should these modern, flexible technology organizations rely on crowd-sourced, unpaid or underpaid labor? As the worldwide market becomes more competitive, people in technical and creative occupations may find that volunteers are making their jobs obsolete. Fact-checking, a traditional staple of journalism, could be replaced by community-sourced editing.

Should Individual Voices Replace Experts and Organizations?

Technology projects find ways to reward and encourage problem solving and innovation. They reach beyond bureaucracies into the community. Some of these projects are housed within universities. There are many crowd-sourced projects going on today – from gathering science data to fact-checking news articles. The organizers of these projects are often enthusiastic about the value of individual voices.

The shortcomings of overvaluing individual voices already show among bloggers, where a chorus of individual voices can sometimes drown out sources that are more reliable. On the other hand, sometimes projects like Wikipedia can eclipse encyclopedias.

Despite the disadvantages of the idealized, crowd-sourced, egalitarian model of creating technology and content, this approach can be very productive if used skillfully. Google uses this model for much of its work.

What Matters More – Innovation or Community?

As Worden says, this popular online business model “blurs the line between the company and its customers, essentially encouraging customers to create the product, and then selling the customers and their work to each other and keeping the profits.” This model benefits businesses, but doesn’t necessarily support the best interests of the communities around them.

Worden worries about the potential of giving inventors infinite freedom to create products which may be dangerous or poorly designed. He believes community values should come first.

The story of the gun and the saber-toothed tiger shows that sometimes relationships should matter more than technology. If the engineering student focuses on assembling the gun, it’s too late. It’s the student’s ability to calm the tiger that may save the day.

Public Health Catches the Wave of Coca-Cola Distribution

In a stopgap solution to an international health crisis, a program called ColaLife is about to use Coca-Cola’s distribution system to bring digestive medicine to places in sub-Saharan Africa where one can buy Coca-Cola but not basic medicines. “One in five children were dying of dehydration in places where you could always have a Coke and a smile,” said Alison Craiglow Hockenberry in a news story for Changemakers.com.

The anti-diarrhea kits will fit into spaces between the bottles in the classic-style red Coca-Cola boxes that are shipped around the world. Zambia is the first country to begin the program, which will start in January.

Coca-Cola advertising (country unknown) (Source: stock.xchng)

Over three years of public-private partnership building took place before these kits were ready to send out to Zambia. The process has been highly collaborative. Package designers changed their plans after hearing feedback from women who wanted reusable and not biodegradable bottles. The program developers also did local market research while developing the name of the package.

To forestall criticism of packaging medicine together with sugary drinks, Hockenberry commented that buying Coca-Cola is not required to receive the medicine. At this stage, the soft drink’s popularity could provide a logical route for sending medication overseas.

Obviously, this program does not change the larger health issues that plague sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world, but it is an interesting example of social innovation and resourceful thinking.

Local Innovation, Local Solutions

It might seem logical that solutions a community develops for its own use would work well locally. But small, innovative groups sometimes have difficulty accessing funding to support their work.

The Obama administration’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation funds locally generated programs and ideas. Although the organizations it supports are established groups, not new ones, other groups are looking at smaller-scale solutions.

Parsons the New School for Design has started a project called Amplifying Creative Communities. Their focus is New York City, particularly the Lower East Side. They’re studying and encouraging the growth of urban gardens and other community resource-sharing projects. An article by Cameron Tonkinwise puts this project in an international context.