August 2022–December 2022

Session 2: Causes and Consequence of

Technology Determinism
4th August 2022
 Technology Determinism is Problematic

Technology as a self-acting force creates new ways of life and thereby determines social change

Technology as a self-acting force provides material for new ways of life

Why we need to know about technological
determinism?

• Technological Determinism as a theory of society (effects/impacts on

society)

• Technological Determinism as a theory of technology (Emergence of

Technology)

• Invention- innovation-diffusion: forms of prognostications of technology

• Technological paradigm and technological system

(i)Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news
and entertainment was then so great that it altered all preceding media of news and entertainment.

(ii) Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of social
communication was then so great that it altered many of our institutions and forms of social relationships.

(iii) Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its inherent properties as an
electronic medium altered our basic perceptions of reality, and thence our relations with each other and
with the world.

(iv) Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. As a powerful medium of
communication and entertainment it took its place with other factors – such as greatly increased physical
mobility, itself the result of other newly invented technologies in altering the scale and form of our
societies.

(v) Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research, and developed as a medium of
entertainment and news. It then had unforeseen consequences, not only on other entertainment and
news media, which it reduced in viability and importance, but on some of the central processes of family,
cultural and social life.
(vi) Television, discovered as a possibility by scientific and technical research, was selected for investment
and development to meet the needs of a new kind of society especially in the provision of centralised
entertainment and in the centralised formation of opinions and styles of behaviour.

(vii) Television, discovered as a possibility by scientific and technical research, was selected for investment
and promotion as a new and profitable phase of a domestic consumer economy ; it is then one of the
characteristic 'machines for the home'.

(viii) Television became available as a result of scientific and technical research, and in its character and
uses exploited and emphasised elements of passivity, a cultural and psychological inadequacy, which had
always been latent in people, but which television now organised and came to represent.

(ix) Television became available as a result of scientific and technical research, and in its character and uses
both served and exploited the needs of a new kind of large-scale and complex but atomised society.
Can we predict technology?: Invention, Innovation
and Diffusion
Historical and Intellectual Origin of Technological
Determinism
• European exploration of non-Western societies

• Colonialism: Machine as Civilizer

• Modernization theory for post-colonial development

• Marx’s theory of Political Economy: mechanization of society as an

inevitable historical development

The Fetish of Technology (Harvey 2003)

• Control of Labour
• Domination of Nature
• The Annihilation of Space and Time
• Fictitious Values /Fictitious Capitals
• The Technologies of Consumption, Spectacle, and Fantasy Production
Paradox of Technology (Feenberg 2010)

• The paradox of the parts and the whole

• The paradox of the obvious
• The paradox of the origin
• The paradox of the frame
• The paradox of action
• The paradox of the means
• The paradox of complexity
• The paradox of value and fact
• The democratic paradox
• The paradox of conquest
References
• Adas, M. (1990). Machines as the measure of men: Science, technology,
and ideologies of Western dominance. Cornell University Press
• Feenberg, A. (2010). Ten paradoxes of technology. Techné: Research in
Philosophy and Technology, 14(1), 3-15. 6
• Harvey, D. (2003). The fetish of technology: Causes and consequences.
Macalester International, 13(1), 7
• Nye, D. E. (2007). Technology matters: Questions to live with. MIT Press.
(pp. 17-32) (Chapters: “Does Technology Control us” and “Is Technology
Predictable?”)
• Williams, R. (2003). The technology and the society. Television: Critical
concepts and cultural studies, 2, (pp.42-57)