The Impact of Culture on Technology: A Case Study from Lewis Mumford

In a refreshing inversion of more recent writings of the effects of technology on the culture of cities (e.g. this piece in which Adam Greenfield contemplates the deleterious effects of laptops on the conviviality of coffeehouses), Lewis Mumford offers the following illustration of the effect of urban form (here, suburbia) on the nature of technology:

With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals. To exercise free speech in such a scattered, dissociated community, one must 'buy time' on the air or 'buy space' in the newspaper. Each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized; he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit. (The City in History, 1961, pp. 512-13)

Here, perhaps, we get a glimpse of the preconditions for the industrial information economy that is given such a drubbing in Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. Had we maintained - in lieu of suburbia - a pattern of urban form that provided the individual with the opportunity for first-hand participation in the substance of society, would we have been needed the palliative of a corporate mass media? Mumford's example reminds us that in the course of our meditations on the impact of technology, we need always recall the social and environmental contexts that gave rise to those technologies, and to consider the related significance of both for the nature of our lives.