But then, a couple of days ago I finally started to read the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1984. In the 1977-1978 term the topic of that class was “Sécurité, Territoire, Population” (STP, Gallimard, 2004) and it holds, in my view, the key to a quite different perspective on how social networking platforms can be thought of as tools of governance involved in specific mechanisms of power.
STP can be seen as both an extension and reevaluation of Foucault’s earlier work on the transition from punishment to discipline as central form in the exercise of power, around the end of the 18th century. The establishing of “good practice” is central to the notion of discipline and disciplinary settings such as schools, prisons or hospitals serve most of all as means for instilling these “good practices” into their subjects. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon – a prison architecture that allows a single guard to observe a large population of inmates from a central control point – has in a sense become the metaphor for a technology of power that, in Foucault’s view, is part of a much more complex arrangement of how sovereignty can be performed. Many a blogpost has been dedicated to applying the concept on social networking online.

Curiously though, in STP, Foucault calls the Panopticon both modern and archaic, and he goes as far as dismissing it as the defining element of the modern mechanics of power; in fact, the whole course is organized around the introduction of a third logic of governance besides (and historically following) “punishment” and “discipline”, which he calls “security”. This third regime is no longer focusing on the individual as subject that has to be punished or disciplined but on a new entity, a statistical representation of all individuals, namely the population. The logic of security, in a sense, gives up on the idea of producing a perfect status quo by reforming individuals and begins to focus on the management on averages, acceptable margins, and homeostasis. With the development of the social sciences, society is perceived as a “natural” phenomenon in the sense that it has its own rules and mechanisms that cannot be so easily bent into shape by disciplinary reform of the individual. Contemporary mechanisms of power are, then, not so much based on the formatting of individuals according to good practices but rather on the management of the many subsystems (economy, technology, public health, etc.) that affect a population so that this population will refrain from starting a revolution. Foucault actually comes pretty close to what Ulrich Beck’s will call, eight years later, the Risk Society. The sovereign (Foucault speaks increasingly of “government”) assures its political survival no longer primarily through punishment and discipline but by managing risk by means of scientific arrangements of security. This not only means external risk, but also risk produced by imbalance in the corps social itself.

I would argue that this opens another way of thinking about social networking platforms in political terms. First, we would look at something like Facebook in terms of population not in terms of the individual. I would argue that governmental structures and commercial companies are only in rare cases interested in the doings of individuals – their business is with statistical representations of populations because this is the level contemporary mechanisms of power (governance as opinion management, market intelligence, cultural industries, etc.) preferably operate on. And second – and this really is a very nasty challenge indeed – we would probably have to give up on locating power in specific subsystems (say, information and communication systems) and trace the interplay between the many different layers that compose contemporary society.

The term “determine” is often used rather lightly by those who write about the political dimension of technology. At the same time the accusation of “technological determinism” – albeit sometimes right on target – is being used as a means to exclude discussion of technological parameters from the humanities and the social sciences. But what is actually meant by “technological determinism”? In my view, there are three basic forms of thinking about determinism when it comes to technology:

The first is very much connected to French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and holds that technological evolution is largely self-determined. His notion of “tendance technique” takes its inspiration from evolutionary theory in the sense that the technology evolves blindly but following the paths carved out by the “choices” made throughout its phylogenesis (this has been called “cumulative causation” or “path dependency” by some). Leroi-Gourhan’s perspective has been developed further by Deleuze and Guattari in their concept of “phylum” and, most notably, by philosopher of technology Gilbert Simendon (who’s work is finally going to be translated into English, hopefully still in 2008) who sees the process of technological evolution as “concretization”, going from modular designs to always more integrated forms. “Technological determinism” would mean, in this first sense, that technology is not the result of social, economic, or cultural process but largely independent, forcing the other sectors to adapt. Technology is determined by its inner logic.

A more colloquial meaning of technological determinism is, of course, connected to the Toronto school, namely Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan. This stuff is so well known and overcommented that I don’t really want to get into it – let’s just say that technology, here, determines social process either by installing a specific rapport to covering space and time (Innis) or by establishing a certain equilibrium of the senses (McLuhan). You can find dystopical versions of the same basic concept in Ellul or Postman: technology determines society, to state matters bluntly.

I would argue that there is third version of technological determinism which is, although not completely dissimilar, far more subtle than the last one. Heidegger’s framing of technology as Gestell (an outlook based on cold mathematical reasoning, industrial destruction of more integrated ways of living, exploitation of nature, etc.) opens up a question that has been taken up by a large number of people in design theory and practice: is technology determined to follow the logic of Gestell? In Heidegger’s perspective, technology is doomed to exert a dehumanizing force on being itself: the determinism here does not so much concern the relationship between technology and society but the essence (Wesen) of technology itself. A lot of thinking about design over the last thirty years has been based on the assumption that a different form of technology is possible: technology that would escape its destiny as Gestell and be emancipating instead of alienating. Discourse about information technology is indeed full of such hopes.

Although “technological determinism” refers most often to the second perspective, a closer examination of “what determines what” opens up a series of quite interesting questions that go beyond the vulgar interpretations of McLuhan’s writings. For those who still adhere to the idea that tools determine their use, here is a list of possible remedies:

1. Look at design studies where determinism has been replaced by the quite elegant notion of affordance.
2. Read more Actor-Network Theory.
3. Think about what Roland Barthes meant by “interpretation”.
4. Dust off your copy of Hall’s “encoding/decoding”.
5. Work as a software developer and marvel at the infinity of ways users find to use, appropriate, and break your applications.