Importance of the social in technology and its diffusion

Raymond Williams recognized the often taken for granted power that communication between individuals has on the diffusion of any innovation. Understanding interpersonal communication, which is just transmission of ideas between individuals is requisite to the process of diffusion. Appeals to logic and reason are less important than who the agent for change communicates with. Focusing too much on the technology will harm its potential for diffusion. One must study the cultural/societal system in order to understand how best to market an object of diffusion. Williams' example of water boiling in a Peruvian village is the clearest model for how not to approach diffusion. This approach is very much tied to McLuhan's ideas about tribal and literate cultures. This is ironic in that McLuhan comes across as more of a technological determinist and positivist, but nevertheless, his arguments about how tribal and literate cultures communicate differently could not be more accurate. As McLuhan states, "the latest approach to media study considers not only the content, but the medium and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates."

McLuhan's notion that the medium is the message is often misunderstood. What McLuhan means by this is that the medium creates and introduces a new dimension that alters human relations. McLuhan's best example is " For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for." The medium's importance and influence are often taken for granted, while message content usually gets the lion's share of analysis.

Williams further illustrates this point by stating "what many cultural determinists are in danger of missing: the things themselves matter." This is just another way of saying that the medium is the message. He goes on to state that "technologies aren't invented from thin air.:

Bush outlines the description of a device that resembles a modern computer equipped with the high-speed internet and the latest gui operating system, quite an innovation. His predictions are somewhat remarkable. What must be realized is that innovations do not occur in a cultural vacuum. No doubt, Bush's vision was influenced by what was happening during the time he wrote this article, and no doubt that he influenced in some way the technology as it exists today.

Englebart thoroughly discusses the conceptual framework of augmenting human capabilities, which are of course related to the diffusion of innovation. He even directly quotes Bush's article as an example of how we can augment our capabilities.

Now we are in an age of technoculture, but interpersonal communication is still central in propagating innovations, which increasingly augment human capacity to produce and destroy. The importance of the medium in this process cannot be underestimated.