technological determinism

Technology and Culture

Technological Determinism

Technology and Culture

Complex relationship between culture and technology

Pervasive influence of technology makes the issues pertinent to many disciplines

“Any theoretical engagement with this thing called technoculture needs to be as dynamic as its object.

Theory needs to be supple, not monolithic.”Murphie, A. & Potts, J., (2003) Culture and Technology, Palgrave Macmillan

How would we define…

Technology Culture

Are we talking about technology with a big T or a small t?

Technoculture

Can we talk about culture without talking about Technology (with a big T)?

Kulturetechnik refers to technologies that you must be able to use to take part in a culture. (It has no equivalent word in English).

Technology

Shows how meanings change over time

Current meanings of the word emerged in the second half of 19c (Marx never used the word)

Use developed along with other terms like ‘industrial revolution’ to describe the radical re-structuring of western societies as a result of the industrial processes

Tekhne

• ‘art’ ‘craft’

Logos

• ‘word’ ‘system’ ‘study’

Technology has now become so ubiquitous that it is said we now live in technology

“Technology has been generalised to the point of abstraction: it suggests an overarching

system that we inhabit”Murphie, A. & Potts, J., (2003) Culture and Technology, Palgrave Macmillan

Technology

Is it about artificiality?

Technology is not natural but made by human beings?

“Technology can be viewed as that constellation of knowledge, processes, skills and products whose aim

is to control and transform”Simpson, L.C., 1995. Technology, time, and the conversations of modernity, Routledge.

Culture

Cultura (origin)

• ‘tending’ ‘cultivation’

Culture (16c)

• ‘cultivation of mind’

Culture (19c)

• ‘intellectual’ ‘artistic’

“one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”

Williams, R (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Collins

Culture

“one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”

Williams, R (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Collins

How would you define the word ‘culture’?

Culture

Culture is dynamic not static

Like technology it is conditioned by political and economic forces

Notions of dominant and oppositional cultures – contradictions

Determinism

Linklater, R., (2007). Waking life, 20th Cenury Fox.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmMP7Vzf_0I

DeterminismIt is said that there are two forms of Determinism

“Hard Determinism” and “Soft Determinism”

Soft Determinism

Hard Determinism

Theory is often said to be Deterministic or Non-Deterministic

Non Deterministic

Soft Determinism

Hard Determinism


Termed coined by Thorstein Veblen in 1920s

Belief that technology is the agent of social change

Technology moulds society and changes our behaviours and interactions

Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929)


Still massively popular in contemporary post-industrial society

Technological determinism suggests that society is shaped by its dominant technologies

Considers technology as an independent factor


Marx often seen as a technological determinist because of statements such as

“The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam mill with the industrial

capitalist”Marx, K., (2005). The Poverty of Philosophy, Adamant Media Corporation.


Technological determinism usually refers to the present projected onto the future

‘we have no choice but to adopt this technology’

Also a theoretical approach towards the study of cultural effects of technological developments – focus is on the way a new technology creates a new potential and possibility for human activities and thought

Technological DeterminismSo in short the term is contentious

One of the most well known theorists promoting a determinism view was Marshall McLuhan whose premise was that all technologies are extensions of human capacities


He has received renewed attention in the 1990s with the emergence of mass digital technologies

Media are technologies that extend human sense perceptions

"The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.”

McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q., (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Bantam Books.


His famous proposition “the medium is the message” argues that the cultural significance of media lies not in their content but in the way they alter our perception of the world

The impact then of any technology is ‘the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’


The way they alter ‘patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance’

So McLuhan very much seen as a technological determinist defining history by technological change

Critiques

Technological determinism as an explanation is monistic or mono-causal.

Reduces the arguments to cause and effect

It is however very suggestive and very appealing

Lewis Mumford argued that equating technology with tools and machines is itself reductionist

Critiques

Baudrillard for instance argues that contemporary culture is increasingly determined by an array of technologically produced ‘simulacra’ which has come to hi-jack reality itself

McLuhan however was optimistic while Baudrillard is pessimistic (TV is the ‘pornography of everyday life’ beamed back at us)

Cultural Text

Stephen Hill in The Tragedy of Technology discusses the interplay of forces as the ‘cultural text’

“Technological change….is not, by itself, productive of social change. Instead, the direction of change is a product of the particular alignment between the technological possibilities and the society and culture that exists”

Hill, S., 1990. The Tragedy of Technology, Pluto Pr.

Can technology be neutral?

Some critics both arguing for and against technological determinism have suggested that technology is neutral – awaiting deployment


McLuhan denounces this position because for him the most important point is the way technologies structure us

…other theorists contend that new media alters the ‘communicative relationship’ allowing for a diversity of relationships

…or that a new technology creates a precondition for cultural change


The Frankfurt School developed an influential critique of mass culture as an industrialised apparatus all part of a heavily administered social system

Many critics (Marcuse, Adorno, Ellul, Mumford) argued against technology as neutral - rather that technology had become a powerful regulating system in itself


Langdon Winner asked if in fact certain technologies are ‘inherently political’

Do some technologies demand political and cultural responses in themselves?

Do technologies have ideology built into them?

Case Studies

If Technology is Deterministic what effect could we say specific technologies have…

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