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Years ago I got a doctorate in political philosophy. I don’t do much with the degree anymore -- in fact, almost immediately after I got it, I went to work in information technology. I’ve patched code from the 1960s so it would continue to work in the 21st century, built and maintained office networks, written technical manuals for software companies, and, most recently, worked as a software developer for a university.
Although I’m quite happy with my career shift, some colleagues from my past and present lives have difficulty fathoming it because political philosophy and information technology seem to attract people with very different dispositions. Political philosophers are often interested in questions about values, whose answers can’t be proved correct or incorrect but rather are crafted into rhetoric that is more (or less) plausible; information technologists like to tackle problems that have very clear answers.
For example, political philosophers ponder questions like “What is the good life?” and “What is justice?” But in my current job the questions are different. I might get a call from a distressed student or faculty member, saying “The server is down” or “I’m getting a message that says ‘unhandled exception on line 43' -- what does that mean?” I will have a pretty good indication that the problem is fixed once the server is back up, or the error message goes away.
As it happens, though, the field of information technology does not have only technical problems with clear answers; it is also full of political problems, which do not have answers that will satisfy everyone. But although my IT colleagues often make comments like “Oh, that’s a political issue,” they typically use the term in a vaguely pejorative way, and they suggest that political issues are best left to managers and directors, if not avoided altogether.
I’ve heard programmers confess that they prefer to work with machines instead of other humans, because people are unpredictable and less amenable to following intelligent and sensible directions. I know other programmers who put their faith in logic and shy away from any negotiations, believing that the results of negotiations will inevitably be illogical. In its third reader survey, published last November, Network Computing found that “nearly 94 percent of the survey respondents consider politics among the worst aspects of their job.”
The result of that attitude can be too little attention paid to the larger, political issues in information technology -- like finding the proper balance between security and accessibility in a campus network, or deciding whether to build software or buy off-the-shelf products. Given the importance of such problems, and many technologists’ unwillingness to tackle them, faculty members and administrators outside IT should play a larger role in their solutions.
As a first step, many faculty members in particular need to become more technologically literate. Although most professors will soon catch on that IT people aren’t talking about snacks at the campus coffee shop when they refer to cookies and Java, not many faculty members understand the difference between a client and a server, or a server and a network. And faculty members seldom admit that the process of planning, buying, and installing a new piece of software can be as complicated and challenging as the intellectual problems in academic research.
Professors often lament that their universities provide them with poorly designed software, and they complain bitterly about how much time they have to spend learning progressively more complicated and counterintuitive programs. Most universities have programmers and instructional designers who create educational software; interested faculty members can work with them to improve programs, even some of those not developed on the campus. Of course, that isn’t something that every faculty member is willing, or should be expected, to do. But those who are interested can transcend the role of mere consumers.
Technologists who want to -- or must -- work on the big political questions will find their task easier if they can meet partway the faculty members who are also trying to solve the problems. Many IT managers are able to use statistics and other tools of social science to make convincing arguments. Appealing to the humanistic disciplines, which place more emphasis on questions of value, can complement that approach. For example, social science’s powers of description can suggest how to achieve a particular set of goals, but political philosophy can help technologists think more clearly about what those goals should be, and how meeting them would serve the university’s mission.
The political insights that the humanities can bring to bear on IT are too many for me to survey here. But one perspective that is particularly haunting and illustrative of humanism’s insight into the modern industrial world comes from Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber suggested that Western society was becoming so organized and systematized that humans were, metaphorically, in a cage, no longer free to experience life’s enchantments. The image of a cage is worth dwelling on as more and more aspects of work and play have to adapt to the constraints of software.
I suspect that faculty members who think that they are spending an increasing amount of time tinkering with technicalities rather than dwelling on the intellectual problems of their profession would find Weber’s cage all too realistic. If it is any consolation, many IT personnel are equally frustrated when they have to configure and reconfigure tools rather than using the tools for creative ends. If technologists and scholars join forces, perhaps they can identify and fight against IT’s more inimical effects, to ensure that IT serves the university’s ends rather than its own.
As a progenitor of so-called value-free modern social science, Weber was hesitant to leap from a description of modern alienation (as symbolized by the cage) to a prescriptive account of what should be done about it. But IT professionals and faculty members shouldn’t feel a similar constraint when defining visions of technology on their own campus. We may or may not be in an IT cage. The important point to realize is that the management of IT is a distinctly political enterprise -- and we will get better results if we bring values to bear on it, using the academic disciplines that have a long tradition of studying those values.
Luke Fernandez is a Web designer at Weber State University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 42, Page B42