Technology & Society Meets Power

A new book by Professor Jan van Dijk signals a major shift in debate on technology and society – the increasing centrality of power. I’ve endorsed his book, which is aptly entitled Power and Technology (Polity 2024).

Jan van Dijk, an emeritus professor at the University of Twente, has been an exceptionally productive and highly regarded scholar, particularly on issues of technology and society. He has authored some of the major university texts on Technology & Society. Generally, he seeks to integrate multiple theoretical perspectives on key concepts and relationships, rather than developing empirical studies or inductive explanations. He works at a highly conceptual level but with many examples to illustrate his points. While I am more of an inductivist, his approach is demonstrably valuable to scholarship in the study of technology and society, evidenced by the success of his work – widely adopted in courses around the world.

His latest book reflects a similar approach. It is an ambitious conceptual mapping of the ways in which power is exerted in nature, technology, and society. He seeks to describe this at multiple (micro-, meso-, and macro) levels of analysis with some special attention given to AI. I’m sure the book will be adopted by many faculty teaching courses on technology and society, where I think it represents or illustrates an important and relatively recent recognition of the significance of power.

Having taught courses on technology and society in early years (decades), particularly focused on information and communication technologies, I found the literature surprisingly weak on issues of power. Van Dijk readdresses this weakness with his focus on power.

Power has been an important theme of major scholars in this area, including Jacques Ellul, Emmanuel Mesthene, Langdon Winner, Al Teich, James Beniger, and many others. But most of the work has focused on the broad societal implications of technical change, with less of a focus on power. The rise of research on the information and communication revolution might have eclipsed this broader literature by turning the attention of many to the societal implications of innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs), as with Daniel Bell’s thesis on the post-industrial society. But even here, power was not a central theme as the technologies seemed too peripheral to ‘politics’ narrowly defined, such as in campaigns and elections.

However, the diffusion of ICTs has put technologies in the hands of ordinary people and its spread has been accompanied by its increasing centrality in all aspects of society. As often said, as a technology changes how and what we know, and how and with whom we communicate, it inevitably disrupts established power structures in organizations and society (Dutton 1999).

There are other innovative features of this book. For example, Van Dijk brings the natural world into this synthesis, reflecting more contemporary realization of the limitations that the natural environment is placing on technological and social change, but also the impact of technical and social change on the natural world. Therefore, this could be a force for expanding earlier debates about technology and society in the context of our environmental crisis.

However, from my personal perspective, I appreciate most the introduction of power in this mix of nature, technology, and society. Power has been one of the most elusive areas of research – so much so that political scientists seldom have focused on this issue, with some major exceptions, such as Robert Dahl. One problem is that it is difficult to find agreement among political scientists on the definition of this relational concept of power, but van Dijk tackles this by defining power in multiple ways – in the many faces of power in nature, technology, and society.

In my own early work on the power shifts shaped by ICTs, I was told it was not political science. But the concept is increasingly surfacing in the literature, such as around empowerment and my own work on the Fifth Estate (2023). It is about time that power takes more center stage in discourse around technology & society, as illustrated by this new book.  

References

Jan van Dijk, (2024), Power and Technology. Cambridge: Polity.

William H. Dutton, (1999), Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

William H. Dutton, (2023), The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the Digital Age. New York: Oxford University Press.