THE HUMAN SHAPE OF TECHNOLOGY

Patterns of control
Peter Stalker argues that society shapes technology - rather than the other way round.

Addicted to perfection
Anuradha Vittachi on the compulsive computer.

Mechanised mayhem
Tim Williams predicts a nuclear disaster.

Programmming for peace
Professional protest in Canada.

Missing women
Where are the female scientists?

The Third Dimension
Dependent technology in developing countries.

Technology - THE FACTS

The end of intelligence
Michael Shallis rejects the intelligent machine.

Reworking the future
The hi-tech workplace - John Tanner reports.

The data dealers
John Murphy doubts the databases.

No Kidding
The Cartesian way of science

Crosscurrents
The alternative approach to computing. Richard Kaziz reports form the US.

THIS month's NI is about new technology. That much you know. But I'll let you into some secrets. Next month the subject is 'peace'; after that 'parenting' and then 'drugs' and then 'work' and so on ad (hopefully) infinitum.

You might well wonder how we arrive at this pattern of subjects - or even if there is any pattern at all. This is a magazine without any discernible editor-in-chief. So who is it that determines what will eventually roll off the presses in Scarborough (Yorkshire), Scarborough (Ontario) and Melbourne (Victoria)?

The answer is: nobody. Or rather, everybody. The NI is a publication firmly rooted in the shifting sands of co-operative idealism, and around which a consensus eventually forms as to subjects which we, and possibly you, want to know more about.

Once a year we sit in a large circle bargaining with each other. Sex! Nicaragua! Crime! Socialism! A case has to be made by the hopeful member for the subject of her or his choice. Is there anything distinctive the NI can say? Will it stretch to a whole issue? What should the NI be arguing for? Is this magazine going to be even remotely interesting? It's a tough test - and some subjects fall by the wayside year after year. Refugees, for example, has often been proposed to us as an important issue that we have never tackled. And there are indeed many millions of people on the move or living in camps around the world. But what would we say about them? Refugees emerge for so many different reasons in different places that there is no real overall pattern - and even less by way of an overall solution.

And we do try to make a coherent statement in each magazine. Our assumption is that you treat each NI much the same way you would a paperback book - and expect it to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It should encapsulate the latest thinking on the issue and should have the facts and the figures to back up what it says. A subject that is too diffuse will never fit into this pattern.

Anyway I raise all this because in a month or two we will have our annual bargaining session with editors from the UK, Australia and Canada converging to dispute what the next twelve months' pages should contain. If there's something you'd like us to tackle, please let us know.

You might never even have read a book on the subject but with the appropriate NI in your hands you'll be able to bluff your way quite a distance.

Of course it will also help if it's a subject that one of us can become fanatically interested in. In the case of new technology most of the impulse has been my personal obsession with computers since the first machine showed up in the office a couple of years ago - and the shelves began to groan under the weight of obscure manuals. But it seemed to us that the politics of new technology were, if anything, less well understood than the technicalities. So what follows is an attempt to expose the human choices that shape new technologies in general (and micro-technology in particular).

Techno-bluffers, this is for you.

Letters
Letter from Murinye
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Father John Medcalf
Reviews: including the NI Classic
Country profile: Niger

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Richard Deverell
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