A big question, philosophized and debated over in my Theories of Communication class last semester—debated, but left largely unanswered—is what, if any, of these overarching sociocultural/technological trends have changed over human history. Does the system itself change, or just the specifics of the networked nodes? On what scale must you look to see the mechanisms of change change? Or, in other words, in what sense are we doomed to repeat history?
While these questions continued to rattle around my brain while reading these essays about technological determinism, I was particularly struck by a set of questions that is, perhaps, actually a subset of the questions above: In our struggle to understand change, how do we represent that change? Each of the readings offered different chronologies in various forms, from Moore's law (which, when described and emphasized by Ceruzzi, has a definite "and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, etc." infinite spiral feel to it) to Heilbroner's argument that the steam-mill had to happen after the hand-mill. At the end of reading Ceruzzi, on the back page I felt compelled to draw what I can only describe as a timeline, though it shows no specific time. What I was trying to decipher, I think, was akin to asking a question like, "Are we all on the same timeline?" Or, said another way, "Are we all limited to following the same timeline?"
While recent history is marked with battles for technological (or at least commercial) superiority—like iOS vs. Android, or VHS vs. Beta—the competing options seem to exist within the same chronology. Whether I choose a Windows or a Mac OS (or an open source system like Linux) does not make a difference to which technological culture I exist in; they all exist in the same one. The only examples I could think of, where someone could reasonably be considered to break with contemporary technocultural norms, would be a chronological break. That is, when I choose to not use a computer (thereby existing in a pre-computer culture) or if I want to live "off the grid," as some people do (though the legitimacy of these anti-technology lives, according to Ceruzzi, is suspect). Ceruzzi's sadness at giving up his slide rule in favor of a calculator illustrated this limited, singular chronology for me, and maybe inspired the original train of thought.
But my point is not so much the train of thought itself, but rather my underlying interest in how technological, scientific, and historical epistemologies should be talked about, illustrated, or otherwise represented. Early on, Marx and Smith use the word "growth" to describe the chronology of human technological history. Ceruzzi uses the word "progression" to describe it. I noticed each of these two words because both of them go just beyond pure description. Generally speaking, both of the words have subtle-but-not-insignificant positive connotations. Are we forced, then, even in our critiques, to see the results of technological determinism—hard or soft—as some kind of success? Is any discussion of technological determinism automatically situated in specific language—verbal, visual, or otherwise? Could we even be having this discussion if we weren't in the cultural system of which technological determinism is also a product? What would that look like? Can we look outside the system? Can we look from outside the system? What would we see?
Great blog. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI also considered the theory of lineal discoveries. I think that technologies inventions work accumulatively. We cannot invent something that is not reachable for scientist or inventor to explain with our knowledge in a certain field. I remembered the film "Back to the future" where Doc makes his time travel machine starting from a vision in his bath. This kind of things does not happen. Science is not like literature that you can write whatever your imagination tells. Science comes always with an explanation. In that movie, when they take future things to the past, people cannot explain it and thus they try to get rid of what the cannot control. Somehow society is not prepared. The high speed trains can double the speed they drive but we are not ready to control that velocity nowadays.
Coco! Your example of random gene variation is an interesting one! The human body has specific systems set-up to check for errors in genetic code (which happen all the time). In a way, this does create a direction—or at least it removes other possible directions. Do you think society has a similar system of checks and balances? I assume it does, but I wonder what the equivalent of "removing a bad gene" is when you're talking about an entire culture. Are war and similar big, dramatic events the most efficient way of social self-correction? Are there subtler ways?
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