Impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on technological developments

09/30/2020 | BIBB

Will the current crisis increase the acceptance for (new) technologies and, if so, for which?

In the case of some aspects, “yes”. With regard to others, a clear “yes and no” and “no”.

What we are obviously going through at the moment, and there is no special sociological originality behind it, is that the crisis has now necessarily led to the overcoming of fears of the unknown vis-à-vis certain communication technologies on the part of certain groups or milieus. Switching certain forms of interaction and communication over to digital technology has perhaps represented certain barriers for people who are of a certain age, who are from a certain educational background and who, let’s say, are more analogue minded in terms of their everyday culture. But, as we all know, now they have been simply forced to try out things with which they may feel uncomfortable in working life, with regard to school and the schoolwork of children and indeed in many areas. And I think that a large proportion of people, the consumers of technological communication support services, have been positively surprised.

Yes and no, but there are aspects of forced acceptance in certain areas of working life. In the schools, too, there are those who have found out “in advance” that the digitalisation of apprenticeships, schools and higher education study that is celebrated in the comparison of countries presented in the PISA Study also has its drawbacks and disadvantages.

No, with regard to an increased acceptance through forced use of technology because there are clearly opponents too – and this does not need to be explained further – and there are also, let’s say, paranoid sceptics who also have a few valid points in this regard. Behind the transparent and user-friendly technologies on the user interface there are major value creation connections, economic interests and, last but not least so to speak, latent stipulations for communication forms and structures too. It is also possible to adopt a very dismissive attitude to this. Apart from the over-dramatisation of the scepticism towards what lies behind the technology, we of course also need to discuss ownership rights and digital sovereignty and make decisions on communication pathways etc. 

Will we fall back to pre-crisis modes of social interaction in society and working arrangement when the current crisis is over?

I believe of course, insofar as possible, that the perceived or cognitively present benefits of face-to-face interaction will mean that people will seek out these forms once they are available again. However – and this was the first question – because acceptance of technologies within the context of a forced reduction of fears of the unknown is almost becoming firmly established, deep-seated and constitutive, e.g. in work contexts, there will of course be adjustments at the macro level. These will concern the relationship between work and life and work and privacy and also schools, training, institutes of higher education and the private sphere. Irrespective of this question of interaction, these will make a return difficult. So we are dealing with a form of dedifferentiation. Classically, one essential aspect in the development of a modern society, at an early stage, in the early modern age, was the separation between work and the private household. We no longer work where we live. We are reversing this to a certain extent. Through structural “couch-potatoship”, something which is euphemistically referred to as working from home. Working from home has its advantages and disadvantages. Everyone knows this, and journalists have pretty much covered the matter. One key aspect is time management. We know this from the studies that have been conducted of relationships between couples across continents. These couples use Skype as a form of comfort or to help overcome the fact that they can only see each other every few months or weeks. Even during absence, and in the absence of technology when it is not used, time rhythms, beats and the rhythmisation of a person’s own life will be subtly adapted to the compulsions which technology exerts. And if this migrates more into the world of work and into the mixing of work and life, we will not be in any position to make this return. 

Will the current crisis change societal inequalities especially regarding the access to technologies?

I would like to put forward a daring hypothetical prognosis. Under certain circumstances, something like an entirely new type of phenomenon will occur under the aspect of inequality, namely the privilege of co-presence will no longer be afforded to everyone. We know this from the world of work, the key term here being time sovereignty. Individual time sovereignty increases in line with status in an economic organisation or in the public sector, project shape, which our colleague Rosa has discussed from perspective of problematic and alienation-intensive acceleration. There is also the advantage that the positive side of the subjectivisation of work is increased. People identify individually with their task, which is part of the value-added chain, i.e. has aspects which are externally determined. They even individuate it, and these opportunities rise in line with time sovereignty. Time sovereignty is also something which is ambivalent with regard to the new communication technologies.

In certain areas, time sovereignty will be linked by new forms of the privilege of co-presence. So we have the time and possibility to seek one another out and to integrate in the form previously described across all these channels and are not reliant on committing ourselves to the restrictive and explicit channels of digital technology. In a similar way, the classic form of conferring with others who are present, relaxed disputation, conversation between autonomous participants could become a privilege for those who release themselves from the expense and costs involved, free themselves from the technical imperatives of availability, of constant availability via email and other networks and say, enough of this, let’s have a closed meeting. These aspects possibly contain a status which is not necessarily exotic but is different because of the prerequisite of increased resource-intensity. Under certain circumstances, this will become a privilege in certain segments of the task, i.e. a higher status in certain areas of work and also in the leading policy making positions etc.

Irrespective of this, the second aspect is, of course, just as relevant, although it is also nothing new, and this is the problem of digital deserts. Spaces of digital poverty in both a social and geographical sense. But this will also develop further. Inequalities will change, because the lack of availability of digital technologies will no longer exclusively and primarily be the problem. The problem will be a lack of agency with regard to deploying the digital technologies and hardware. If you like, with regard to making decisions oneself. Pupils from underprivileged backgrounds now receive a publicly sponsored laptop or tablet so that they can consume e-learning materials sold by Bertelsmann. Firstly, however, they either receive no right of disposal or less of a right of disposal and less competency in terms of being creative themselves. This is not given to them as a matter of necessity. Secondly, and now we arrive back at the key term of indexicalisation, agency over end devices and participation in the Internet are not the only crucial factors. There is also the competency to contextualise and interpret what is imparted via these communication media and relate this to other things which one has at one’s disposal. This is a form of competence and knowledge which can once again only originate from contexts of co-presence, physical co-presence. For example, the ability to weigh up a message from the Internet and make correlations. So if pupils from all backgrounds are equipped with end devices, this will not mean that the use of these end devices is distributed equally. And this is why this second topic, being under equipped, digital desert and so on, is changing. It is changing once again from the perspective of the necessary re-embedding of digital communication on the basis that this re-embedding is reliant on competencies that we gain from interaction.