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Essay on Information Age & Community Psychology
Community & Information Age: An Introduction
Those who support technological development to increase production must ask their assumptions (a) that technological advances are in fact advances, and (b) that productivity is, in and of itself, a useful goal. An often-ignored issue is the extent to which the pursuit of productivity interferes with the balanced fulfillment of basic psychological needs for personal autonomy and a psychological sense of community. Such requirements have in the past often fallen victim to excessively optimistic technological ecstasy, and the present computerization of society is following the historical path. In societies beyond scarcity, production for its own sake should not only be rejected as the most important goal, it must be rejected as a goal at all when it conflicts with autonomy and community.
It was about a century and a half ago, during an earlier age of technological elation, when an indication of today's futurists interestingly described the coming Age of Steam. J. A. Etzler, in a book called The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, with Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery (1842, cited in Winner, 1985, p. 26), wrote the following:
“Fellow Men! I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful of forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years.”
Given the general skepticism that comes with retrospection, this Nineteenth Century promise strikes at the moment as rather over-enthusiastic, as do similar utopian expectations that paved the way for the arrival of other would-be universal remedy...............
