Are we compelled to walk through the doors technology opens, or is technology a tool we use to build the doors we want to walk through?
Do we control technology or does it control us? Does technology change us or reflect us? Or both?
The debate over whether technologies emerge from complex cultural dynamics, or define and continuously shape those dynamics has been on-going for nearly a century with no signs of resolution, and for good reason. Transistor-based technologies are ubiquitous within our culture and have integrated themselves so quickly into our lives, it's hard to see them as anything but a force moving according to its own inscrutable designs. It sweeps us along like a digital king tide upending our social conventions and reshaping the rules of our personal relationships while we struggle to stay afloat.
If these technologies are so uncontrollable and relentless and leave us powerless to resist their impact, do we really want them in our schools? Shaping the minds of our children in ways we cannot comprehend?
The most relentless of these deterministic forces according to Paul Ceruzzi in his essay Moore's Law and Technological Determinism: Reflections on the History of Technology is, obviously, Moore's Law.
He sees Moore's Law, which predicts the doubling of transistors on microchips every 24 months, as existing outside of all cultural influence. It is, as he says, "... an indication of the reality of technological determinism. Computing power must increase because it can." To Ceruzzi, it is the one undeniable example of hard technological determinism that has had an incalculable impact on human culture.
"How do we, as individuals, handle the consequences of Moore's law?" "Can anything other than the limit implied by Planck's constant have an effect on Moore's Law?", he asks.
Luckily, our relationship with technology is not as dour and one-sided as Ceruzzi would have you believe. We don't need to take away our children's computers and rob them of those important hours of Minecraft llama taming, and Moore's Law is not an inescapable force driving technological innovation in directions we cannot predict or control.
In the middle of his essay, Ceruzzi relates a story from the former Dean of Students at MIT, Rosiland Williams. In it, she describes the faculty's reaction to the new administrative software that had been installed by an outside vendor. The response was universal disdain. She recounts that these technological experts stood powerless forced to accept this technology that had been foisted upon them. They had been robbed of all agency -- until they re-engineered it to their liking.
Ceruzzi poses this throwaway question before he dismisses the entire story as missing the point: “If one looked instead at a liberal arts college, less technologically savvy than MIT, would the deterministic nature of computing assert itself more strongly?”
This question, though unanswered in his essay, seems to betray Ceruzzi's central premise. Shouldn't the deterministic impact of Moore's Law, standing outside of cultural influence, have a uniform impact across all of society?
What if our relationship to the technology we use determines its impact on us? In Rosiland's story, the sense of powerlessness the group experiences is directly tied to the complexity of their relationship to the technology. If that's the case, then technological determinism is simply a stand-in for the degree to which a group is willing to cede agency to a technology that they do not understand. In that sense, it isn't deterministic, it's a choice. The MIT faculty chose to band together and reconstitute the technology to their needs. Technology facilitating social cohesion.
As Bertram Bruce observes in his paper, Technology as Social Practice, "...technologies and social relations are mutually constituted."
While our relationship to technology may be complex, it is not inscrutable. While it is at times unbalanced, it is not one-sided. As our relationship with technology continues to evolve, we must continue to explore, understand, and diligently re-define that relationship.
Bruce concludes by saying, "A technology is a system of people, texts, artifacts, activities, ideology, and cultural meanings. It doesn't so much determine, as become social practices. Our task then must be [to] consider critically what those social practices are now and what they can become in the future."
Hello Spencer ... this is an excellent recap of the readings for week two that deal with technological determinism, a topic also richly explored in the article "Toward a Theory of New Literacies ..." (Leu et all, 2004) What keeps coming back to my mind is "form vs content" from the week one video "The Machine Is Us" (Wesch) and that these things became distinct. In my mind, it seems that today we are weighing too heavily on form (ie. platform) and not enough on content. For example, Zoom. Due to COVID, people needed a quick answer, and Zoom--without much reflection (or rather, the luxury of reflection) became the widespread de facto solution. Now, people are scapegoating Zoom for not delivering, because few assessed the content (instructional needs) before selecting the form. I think THAT is where the powerlessness that you refer above stems from ... (also a topic of my post this week:)
ReplyDeleteHi Spencer,
ReplyDeleteImpressive reading response! I was thinking of and reviewing the key points advanced in our readings while reading your article. I like the questions you raised, "do we want them in our schools? Shaping the minds of our children in ways we cannot comprehend?". They shift our focus back to the education practice to consider teachers' and students' relationships with technologies. I agree with your point that our relationship with technologies is not that dour and one-sided. I think the whole process of adopting technologies into social practices can be mediated by humans, we do have choices to do so, even though the Moor's law is at work. For example, from the perspective of teachers, they should do not only focus on the engaging form of technologies. Instead, they ought to consider a series of problems, whether this technology is the key factor that impacts students' learning experience, what is the best way of using it in classes, what is the extent to which technologies are implicated in classes.