Hughes and Second Creation

So this is one piece I need to hang on to from the original blog:

So I've been reading Thomas P. Hughes. Some stuff I've been revisiting (such as Networks of Power and “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems” from The Social Construction of Technological Systems. It seems the standard reading of Hughes is that he's a social constructivist, which means, you know, like that people make machines, right?

Well, yeah. And, in turn, machines make people, too.

I have to admit that I was rather delighted by Rescuing Prometheus because it showed the subtlety of Hughes' thinking. Or maybe I'm just humoring myself because I believe that Hughes is saying something that validates my own argument.

Namely, front and center, I am trying to show that public involvement in broadband projects (among other instances of public engagement) is having several noteworthy consequences. At the very least, it is a shift away from infrastructure construction by engineers and managers, a shift that Hughes (rather clunkily) describes as a postmodern paradigm of project development.

More crucially, Hughes tells us that the integral part of that shift toward the postmodern is the role of the public:

"A key characteristic of the new approach is public participation. This implies the need for a public informed about the creative process of system building and the ways in which its values can be embedded in the second creation. Prometheus, the creator, once restrained by defense projects sharply focused upon technological and economic problems, is now fee to embrace the messy environmental, political, and social complexity of the postindustrial world." (Rescuing Prometheus, p. 14).

That messy environment is precisely what I'm interested in. Hughes account of what's new and important about contemporary public projects.

Hughes describes the shift toward messiness as a rejection of Fordism and Taylorism(which is really a questioning of the received wisdom of the Enlightenment model):

"During the half-century following World War II, America continued to produce a cornucopia of material goods through modern management and engineering. Alongside this capitalistic, free-enterprise achievement, the country's capacity to create the large-scale technological systems that structure our living spaces has grown as well. Post-World War II government-funded projects have introduced a creative management and engineering style substantially different from one called modern that flourished during the period between the two world wars.

"The modern, or pre-World War II, managerial and engineering approach associates management with large manufacturing firms rather than with joint ventures and projects such as SAGE, Atlas, Central Artery/Tunnel, and ARPANET. Unlike post-World War II managers and engineers invovled with projects that introduced new technolgogical systems, such as computer networks and urban highways, the prewar managers and engineers became employees of well-established firms whose products changed only incrementally." (p. 300)