Editorial: The Two Cultures Revisited – 2022

Abstract

For decades, IT professionals and the users of IT have been at odds. While this is deplorable, this situation is not unique to IT. There are many cases of highly specialized, technical experts in conflict with those who benefit from that expertise. Consider the recently-visible, but fraught, relationship between elected officials and their public health experts during the COVID pandemic. In fact, the IT professional/user conflict is not even particularly visible to society at large. Other conflicts, however, are more historic. The year 2009 was the 50 anniversary of Sir Charles Percy Snow’s now classic “Two Cultures” Rede Lecture at Cambridge University (Snow, 1959, 1971). This original 1959 lecture seemed, at that time, to be a polemic intended to inflame and annoy. A variety of commentators have since pointed out how Snow’s essay was typical of mid-20th-century thought, attempting to find order in the chaos created by conflicts between science and the arts (Glass, 1959; Boytinck, 1980; Davis, 1965; Halperin, 1983). Dizikes (2009), along with others, correctly pointed out that Snow’s ideas were a product of his time. In fact, as Snow himself pointed out, his was not the first attempt at commentary on the purported science/arts dichotomy. Snow’s recommendations were salient to his time and seem quaint now as we face environmental Armageddon rather than (or perhaps “in addition to”) Snow’s nuclear Armageddon of 1959 and more recently viral Armageddon, in addition to the very real threat of the use of nuclear arms in Ukraine by Mr. Putin today. Recent trends, however, make it imperative that IT professionals pay attention to this “quaint” notion. The “Mid-century angst” of 1959 has reared its ugly head again; many of the dichotomies that drove the broader culture in 1959 have reappeared in other guises, some unimaginable in 1959, such as the threat that AI might replace all of human creativity (Harari, 2016). Because of this salience, we attempt to (1) find lessons in Snow’s lecture for practitioners of the “science” of information systems; (2) point out that IT expertise has a far broader and more dangerous implication than is usual for professional expertise; and (3) try to explain what IT use is really about. Users can and should play a bigger, more responsible role in determining the use and ultimately the value of information systems. Perhaps John Kennedy’s words from 1961, restated in IT nationalistic terms, might guide us: “Ask not what IT can do for you, but what you can do for IT.” For this issue’s editorial, we will first review Snow’s “two-culture” hypothesis by revisiting his original speech as applicable to the current interaction of another “two cultures”: IT professionals or purveyors (ITP) including developers, marketers, and researchers of information technology; and IT users (ITU) employing IT for business and daily life. Next, we will explore five contemporary influences or trends that that make this cultural distinction even more salient and see whether the lessons Snow suggested are useful. Finally, we will speculate on how to apply the warnings from 1959 in terms of global information technology management in 2022.