Re: [Air-L] Technology as ideologically neutral?
If someone says "it's just a tool", I often reply with Abraham Maslow's observation that "When your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems begin to look like nails." -- Nick Breems - PhD Student @ University of Salford - Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ Dordt College (on leave) Email: nbreems@dordt.edu Mobile phone: (from UK): 0771 822 9005 (from US): 011 44 771 822 9005
On Saturday, July 07, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Zeynep Tufekci <socnetres@gmail.com> wrote: Another crucial variant is the "it's just a tool" formulation, commonly found in popular debates. This kept cropping up during discussions of the role of new media in the Arab uprisings and, in my view, impeded real discussion.
I think that scholars have been so eager to stay away from technological determinism that we've lost sense of how to argue really about the structural accordances of technology. Too often, the more acceptable formulation, "it's socially constructed," also leans towards "it's just a tool" in essence.
-z
On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Cristian Berrio Zapata < cristian.berrio@gmail.com> wrote:
Pls do not let McLuhan out of the scope... in McLuhan, M. (1995). The Playboy Interview. Essential McLuhan, 233-269.
“*In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves*.” (McLuhan, 1995)
On the other hand, I am a fan of applying the "complexity" view to all ICT views. Therefore it would be quite difficult to sepparate politics, from ideology, from economics, from culture, all of them part of the Internet-Web pack. It comes to be very visible when looking at digital divide programes applied to indigenous communities.
Regarding the "amputation" problem also raised by McLuhan, ICT tools let "self perception" out of the scope. Self perception (proprioception and tactile perception) is the base of affective bound, "love". Then, what are we depriving new generations of?
2012/7/7 jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu>
I find this to be an interesting debate, though mostly the question is where the ideology actually exists. Does it exist in the object itself? relations to the object from other objects? relations to the object to semiotic systems around it? relations to socius or culture? or in the systems alone, cultures alone, socius, alone, etc.
basically there is a matrix here of ideologies, contexts, objects and their axiologies operating both ontologically ala mereological constructions and epistemologies. With many blurry middle grounds.
I hold that artifacts have politics in themselves, but i'm not sure that all artefacts have ideologies in themselves. The question i tend to raise and ask people to write about is... what is the politics of the toaster, because the toaster has a whole political economics and a politics, but does it have an implied ideology. Now the design of a toaster can certainly have ideological components, but the idea of a toaster may perhaps not, though granted whether the idea exists outside of the set of objects is another debate for the Platonists to take up.
however... I wonder about the neutrality of the internet because as I've argued here before, that while there is no real internet beyond reference to a conceptual idea that encompasses many technologies and systems that lack what i'd all think of as a unity beyond the concept. So does it as a whole have a neutrality or an ideology? there is a certain technocratic rationality to it, and that rationality certainly has a traditionally critiqued ideology, but is that in it, or in the design of it, or in the relations of it within historic contexts? and isn't neutrality and the claim to it, an ideological claim? I've always tended to argue that the claim toward neutrality and objectivity is almost always ideological.
one of my favorite authors on this technology as ideology is Paul Virilio and my second favorite is Walter Benjamin in Arcades Project.
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-- *Cristian Berrío Zapata* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Perhaps ("old" but good): Flanagin, A., Maynard, W., Farinola, Metzger, M. (2000). The technical code of the Internet/World Wide Web.* Critical Studies in Media Communication*, 17. 409-428 Using Feenberg's (1995a, 1995b) concept of the technical code of technological artifacts, this essay examines the evolution and current status of the Internet/World Wide Web. The idea of technical code-the cultural and social values and choices that become manifest in a technology's physical and structural forms-helps to isolate and uncover issues of design, usage, and policy that guide the Internet. In turn, the Internet/WWW can be seen in terms of the values, priorities, and assumptions that have literally become built into it. Based on this analysis, implications of the Internet's technical code and alternative outcomes are discussed. -TED On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Nick Breems <nbreems@dordt.edu> wrote:
If someone says "it's just a tool", I often reply with Abraham Maslow's observation that "When your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems begin to look like nails."
-- Nick Breems - PhD Student @ University of Salford - Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ Dordt College (on leave)
Email: nbreems@dordt.edu Mobile phone: (from UK): 0771 822 9005 (from US): 011 44 771 822 9005
On Saturday, July 07, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Zeynep Tufekci <socnetres@gmail.com> wrote: Another crucial variant is the "it's just a tool" formulation, commonly found in popular debates. This kept cropping up during discussions of the role of new media in the Arab uprisings and, in my view, impeded real discussion.
I think that scholars have been so eager to stay away from technological determinism that we've lost sense of how to argue really about the structural accordances of technology. Too often, the more acceptable formulation, "it's socially constructed," also leans towards "it's just a tool" in essence.
-z
On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Cristian Berrio Zapata < cristian.berrio@gmail.com> wrote:
Pls do not let McLuhan out of the scope... in McLuhan, M. (1995). The Playboy Interview. Essential McLuhan, 233-269.
“*In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves*.” (McLuhan, 1995)
On the other hand, I am a fan of applying the "complexity" view to all ICT views. Therefore it would be quite difficult to sepparate politics, from ideology, from economics, from culture, all of them part of the Internet-Web pack. It comes to be very visible when looking at digital divide programes applied to indigenous communities.
Regarding the "amputation" problem also raised by McLuhan, ICT tools let "self perception" out of the scope. Self perception (proprioception and tactile perception) is the base of affective bound, "love". Then, what are we depriving new generations of?
2012/7/7 jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu>
I find this to be an interesting debate, though mostly the question is where the ideology actually exists. Does it exist in the object itself? relations to the object from other objects? relations to the object to semiotic systems around it? relations to socius or culture? or in the systems alone, cultures alone, socius, alone, etc.
basically there is a matrix here of ideologies, contexts, objects and their axiologies operating both ontologically ala mereological constructions and epistemologies. With many blurry middle grounds.
I hold that artifacts have politics in themselves, but i'm not sure that all artefacts have ideologies in themselves. The question i tend to raise and ask people to write about is... what is the politics of the toaster, because the toaster has a whole political economics and a politics, but does it have an implied ideology. Now the design of a toaster can certainly have ideological components, but the idea of a toaster may perhaps not, though granted whether the idea exists outside of the set of objects is another debate for the Platonists to take up.
however... I wonder about the neutrality of the internet because as I've argued here before, that while there is no real internet beyond reference to a conceptual idea that encompasses many technologies and systems that lack what i'd all think of as a unity beyond the concept. So does it as a whole have a neutrality or an ideology? there is a certain technocratic rationality to it, and that rationality certainly has a traditionally critiqued ideology, but is that in it, or in the design of it, or in the relations of it within historic contexts? and isn't neutrality and the claim to it, an ideological claim? I've always tended to argue that the claim toward neutrality and objectivity is almost always ideological.
one of my favorite authors on this technology as ideology is Paul Virilio and my second favorite is Walter Benjamin in Arcades Project.
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-- *Cristian Berrío Zapata* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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-- Ted M. Coopman Ph.D. Lecturer Department of Communication Studies San Jose State University http://www.sjsu.edu/people/ted.coopman/
participants (2)
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Nick Breems -
Ted Coopman