Is humanity celebrated or threatened by information technology in the workplace? Margaret Lloyd RITE Group School of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education Queensland University of Technology

Information technology 'at work' poses a paradox. It is simultaneously indicative of the achievements of the human spirit and the devaluation of the human being as attendant to the machine. The dilemma here is whether information technology in industry is a positive or negative force in contemporary society.

We encounter so many cliches about the rate of change and the 'information age', that it is easy to dismiss what is happening or to accept it as a natural social process. In 1997, I investigated - in preparation for the National Computer Studies Teachersâ Conference in Brisbane - thirty workplaces who use computer-mediated systems and from this experience, I can now say that the cliches will not have the same hollow ring for me any more. Things are changing, palpably, tangibly. Whether those changes are for the good of society - or are merely to satisfy the balance sheets - is yet to be determined. Unemployment is a critical problem in Australia and it is information technology which is an often unacknowledged agent in its inexorable rise. The dilemma to be addressed in this paper arises from my concomitant admiration of the technological processes at work and my fear for the future, the unemployed generations, the social consequences of a 'have' and 'have not' society and the impact on education.

Dilemma question: Is humanity celebrated or threatened by information technology in the workplace?

I call this 'a journey' because it has been more than a job - it has been an experience which has irrevocably altered my thinking about the world and at times, created an extraordinary ambivalence within me towards technology itself.

I must declare myself as a small 's' socialist believing fervently in the power of education to defeat poverty and ignorance; and in the power, and fundamental responsibility of a capital 'S' Society to support all its people. I suspect that I can be legitimately accused of the "sentimental archaism" which Orwell (1950) suggests accompanies any defence of traditionally held beliefs, values and standards.

Each paragraph of this article so far has been deliberately begun with the word "I". What is written is quite clearly a personal view, subject to contradiction or agreement. What has become patently clear in any evaluation of technology in society is that there are no truths. We see as true that which matches our mental models of the world; we cannot claim to speak the truth from anyone's perspective but our own. Thus, what I have seen and experienced is true. It may not be a truth which you may share.

Let me begin in the familiar ground of the classroom. Technology in education can be used in ways which embody what I believe teaching to be. The role of the teacher is as facilitator, a mentor who provides guidance, support and who structures the learning environment. Learning is collaborative. Focus is on the problems to be solved using the technology, not on the technology as an artefact in itself.

Technology in education is not about the access of information. The focus is on the critical information literacy needed to evaluate and apply the information derived from computer-mediated sources. Technology in education is about communication. There is the online communication which enables positive cultural interaction for the children of the world. There is the communication inherent in any dynamic, effective learning environment and especially where collaborative learning is encouraged. Dialogue in classrooms (student:student and student:teacher) is the explicit expression of processes and solutions of problems and strategies.

I do not believe that technology in education has anything to do with employment. That is simplistic nonsense. I say this from a long-held belief that economic rationalism is an inherently dehumanising process which is in direct contravention to the fundamental principles of education. The notion of any educative process, any schooling having a direct link to the economic state of the country is founded on the sands of human capital theory. It is placing the blame on schools for a circumstance which has patently nothing to do with them or their daily operations. No number of vocational programs in the secondary schools of Newcastle would have prevented the closure of the BHP steel works. There are larger forces at work, the chief factor being the increasing globalisation of industry.

My experiences visiting factories and offices which are the biggest, most productive, most superlative in their field but which eerily resembled archetypal Western 'ghost towns' has strengthened my view. In preparation for the conference, I have visited huge manufacturing plants run by a total staff that could not form a cricket team. You would need at least eleven people for that. In one instance, a section of the plant was soon to close putting five people out of work. Their section was the most efficient in the plant, with 0% wastage of materials and extraordinarily low stoppage figures. Their best efforts as a team and as individuals could not prevent their closure. It was cheaper, through an economy of scale, to produce their components in Sydney and freight them to Brisbane than to keep this unit in production in Brisbane. The plant they used was to be sold, no reprieve would be possible if or when the policy was changed. There is no 'sentimental archaism' in industry; economic rationalism is the diametric antithesis of this as a notion. Personal efficiency or excellence is no mitigation in what is a numerical equation in a ledger.

It could be argued that information technology itself engenders a society where this kind of calculation, the 'what if' hypotheses inherent in any spreadsheet, and which led to the retrenchment of those five people is actively encouraged as good management practice. The human beings in the equation are lost; shadows of earlier forms of capitalist oppression reappear. The worker is a functionary, faceless and nameless as much a part of the assembly line as any piece of the machinery. At the beginning of this century, my grandmother worked in a sandshoe factory where she did not know from hour to hour how long she would work. In the 1970s, as a student, I worked in a cannery where you would turn up early in the morning and either be literally given the 'nod' to work for the day or have had a wasted trip. In the 1980s, as a travelling Aussie in England, I worked in a furniture factory where the worker's lavatory breaks were timed. I fervently cherish the sentimental notion that people are more than human resources, a term I deplore and which speaks volumes for the current attitudes to employees. You are a resource with a uniquely identifying employee number.

The technology in the work environment is omnipresent. The 'higher' the technology, the fewer people are needed in the workplace. The effects of technology on unemployment in the newspaper industry, for instance is well documented. As newspapers globally adopted information technology, they replaced the old trades of typesetting overnight. In Brisbane alone, close to one thousand people lost their jobs. Both skills and positions were lost, but the culprit was clear.

In most situations, the tide of change is more subtle, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In one workplace I visited, it was suggested that if robotics were more affordable and reliable, then they would be introduced, replacing the six warehouse hands currently employed. In another instance, the reason for human intervention was that scanning technology (optical character recognition or OCR) was not yet sufficiently advanced to reliably decipher handwriting. In yet another, I was told that there were two people working in a particular section, although only one was really needed, because of Workplace, Health and Safety regulations. As I visited these places, I was frequently reminded of the apocryphal tale about the automated factory which only contains two living things - a worker and a dog. The worker is there to feed and tend the dog. The dog is there to stop the worker touching the machines.

Technology leads to a centralisation of resources. I visited one major installation which would soon be relocated to Melbourne, despite its sole charter to service all of Queensland. Efficient use of telecommunications means that the Queensland centre of operations could be located anywhere in the world - Got a problem in Chinchilla, call Helsinki! By centralising the operations for each state in Melbourne, corporate procedures can be more easily adopted on a national level and replication of functions is reduced or removed. Costs of communication and time differences between the state centres are no longer of issue to the corporation. The new centre would employ 800 people in Melbourne, but would nationally displace a much higher figure.

Thus far, the argument has been one-sided, portraying technology as more of a problem than a solution. So, where is the ambivalence? This arises from the unashamed awe I felt in seeing information systems in action in the workplace. There were times that the ingenuity and often sheer brilliance of what I was seeing left me open-jawed, filled with a great pride in humanity. What human beings can achieve - from the Pyramids, to Moon exploration to computers - is extraordinary.

The systems which worked best were those which inherently reflected the business and the task itself. They were not 'made to fit'; they were installed as a specific solution to a specific problem. In one case, I saw the ironic circumstance of where the business had introduced a system of physical data storage which mimicked its electronic counterpart. Storage was not alphabetical but based on the optimum use of the space; like items did not have to physically be near or adjacent to each other. The tracking system was akin to the file allocation table (FAT) found within any proprietary operating system. Traditional hierarchical systems were being replaced.

I saw where technology was replacing the work of humans - but where that work had been boring, repetitive or dirty - jobs which were already dehumanised by their very nature and the casting of the human being into a servile role, attendant to the machine. I saw where the technology had given factory workers an ownership of their tasks. The monitors on the factory floors gave workers direct access to production data. They then made decisions based on that data and manually altered the processes in hand. The information technology had replaced what was once the province of a strata of middle managers and supervisors (the lavatory timers), their functions subsumed by the technology and responsibility devolved to the factory floor. I spoke to a number of people as I moved through these places, and each spoke articulately about what were the processes and how the data could be interpreted. What I saw was that while there were few employees, their workplace was vastly different from the factories I had survived a decade before. I saw where the workers in the truck assembly factory had brought in plants to make their workspaces more pleasant; a manifest act of ownership of the territory itself. It could be a shift from quantity to quality. These people had real involvement in their tasks, and it was due to the processes of restructuring and the implementation of information technology in the workplace. These people were assured of employment because the business was paying its way in financially straitened times. The means to balance the books was to make tough decisions, based on data not sentiment. One manager's office I entered carried a sign, 'In God I Trust, but I really believe in data'.

I saw one workplace devoted solely to the storage of information. The facility I visited was the smallest of three in Brisbane dedicated to this purpose. I walked down the aisles between the racks which reached the ceiling, 20 metres above me, a tribute to the tensile strength of steel, to get a sense of the place, the sheer volume of information in this one location. This is a contemporary version of the ancient library of Alexandria, a repository of the knowledge of the known world. I had a manifest sense of what the term 'information' age actually means. This was not the Alexandrian compendium of knowledge, this was one corner of one part of the page. The whole book defies comprehension. As a society, we seem totally committed to the production and reproduction of information; so much so that a whole new industry has emerged dedicated to its storage. Information technology here functions as an archival retrieval system. The crate holding the 'Lost Ark' wouldn't be lost in this system, it would be bar-coded and tracked from its arrival to its requested retrieval or its removal for destruction by the specified date.

I saw information systems in place which meet our late-twentieth century demands for efficiency and speed. I have seen how your bags are tracked from the moment you book into an airport to how your call for a taxi is logged. Everything the information systems do is in direct response to our ever-increasing demands for perfection. I saw, too that much of the cost-cutting made possible by information technology was to meet our inconsistent demands for ethically sound products which remain inexpensive. There is little place for my quaint 'sentimental archaism' here. I saw, too that much of the cost-cutting made possible by information technology was to meet our untenable demands for ethically sound products which remain inexpensive.

I have seen digital video production and computer simulations which are a product of the new technologies themselves. Creative applications which celebrate both the human and technological capabilities inherent in the process. There is no replacement in this scenario, what is seen is a new and vibrant industry setting its own benchmarks. My sense of awe was again aroused to see ventures which make the impossible possible, and which invents that which does not currently exists.

We encounter so many cliches about the rate of change and the 'information age' today, that it is easy to dismiss what is happening or to accept it as a natural social process. I feel that the cliches will not have the same hollow ring for me any more - things are changing, palpably, tangibly. Whether those changes are for the good of society - or are merely to satisfy the balance sheets - is yet to be determined. Unemployment is a critical problem in Australia and it is information technology which is an often unacknowledged agent in its inexorable rise. My ambivalence arises from my concomitant admiration of the technological processes at work and my fear for the future, the unemployed generations, and the social consequences of a 'have' and 'have not' society.

The role that schools should play in this is not clear; but I do believe that what has led to the growing vocationalism we now see is alarmist rhetoric and has created the possibility of our educating children for a future that will not exist. There are some very positive outcomes from the vocational programs now in place; but that, as before, is due to the pragmatism and idealism of Australia's teachers. It does, I believe, have nothing to do with the flawed premises on which the 'vocationalistion' or 'convergence' of industry and education rests. It is not a legitimisation of the underlying principle and its inherent acceptance of blame. Corporate Australia and information technology are culpable. Education is the scapegoat.

I fervently believe that technology is a social construct, that it is not preternaturally determined to shape or change society, and that pro-active measures should be taken to stem the tide of unemployment created by technology. We cannot afford - as an economy, as a society, as a group of caring human beings - to stand by and allow this nameless phenomenon to occur. We have had depressions and recessions - but what is this? I would hazard that this is an erosion - a gradual reduction of opportunities for employment, hitting hardest those who will have the greatest difficulty to re-adjust and re-orient their lives. Education is part of the process of restoration, but educating someone to participate in a system which reflects the past rather than the future is futile. I would prefer to think of the current phenomena as transitional; the smokestacks are gone which is a social step for the better but no other labour intensive processes have stepped in to fill the void. It is neither sentimental nor archaic to care about what is happening; it is unethical to do otherwise. Technology should not be allowed to determine the shape of the future, nor should economic rationalism, nor sentimental archaism. The present does not belong to the past, it belongs to the future.

Author: Margaret Lloyd, RITE Group, School of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, Queensland University of Technology. Email: mm.lloyd@qut.edu.au Please cite as: Lloyd, M. (1998). Is humanity celebrated or threatened by information technology in the workplace? In C. McBeath and R. Atkinson (Eds), Planning for Progress, Partnership and Profit. Proceedings EdTech'98. Perth: Australian Society for Educational Technology. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/edtech98/pubs/articles/lloyd.html