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KIT311 2015 Assignment 1 Reflection on Technology and Human Society

In this short assignment, I wish to discuss the issue of technological determinism. I will
look at some of the numerous essays in the MIT Press release Does Technology Drive
History? and briefly at work of Marshall McLuhan.

Interestingly enough, although when the phrase technological determinism is used

today, it is often associated with a nagging unease and an unwelcome sense of
constraint, in the first essay in the collection Does Technology Drive History?, entitled
Technological Determinism in American Culture by Merritt Roe Smith. He traces the
initial stirrings of technological determinism in American culture only to find that the
notion of technological determinism that seems to so constrain the modern world were
to America in the 1800s associated with inevitable progress and improvement, not only
in the technological sphere, but with its corollary in the moral sphere. What went wrong
though? How do we get from that rosy vision to todays unease? There were early critics
of the growing mechanical and technological reality, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry Thoreau among them, but the larger cultural zeitgeist can be seen
through wider events.

In the next essay, M.L. Smiths next essay, Recourse of Empire, Smith notes some of
these features. He writes

In December 1953, President Eisenhower told the United Nations that a new atoms
for peace program would transform the greatest of destructive forces into a great
boon for the benefit of all mankind.
The following September, he waved a radioactive wand that broke ground for the
nations first commercial nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Thirty-five
years later, the core of the decommissioned Shippingport reactor was shipped to the
Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington for burial.
(At the same time, Hanford a key facility for nuclear weapons production since World
War II was being converted into a massive environmental clean-up operation to
minimize the severe health and safety threats resulting from nearly a half-century of
inadequate safety standards and careless waste disposal at an estimated cost of between
30 billion and 50 billion dollars.) While the Shippingport reactor was in operation,
major controversies arose over cooling systems, radioactive waste disposal, and worker
and community safety; the peaceful atoms became as controversial as its military
counterpart. The accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, along
with previously unreleased information about earlier accidents around the world,
reversed long-standing public support for nuclear power in the United States. The
trajectory of space exploration also proved uneven. The Soviet Unions launch of
Sputnik 1 in October 1957 had sent Congress scurrying to create NASA and to land
Americans on the moon. In the early years of the space program, huge budget
allocations for space exploration were justified in terms compatible with the Science
on the March conveyor belt of unimaginable wonders. What the next generation
discovered was the absence of clear post-Apollo goals Not even the automobile,
sacred emblem of American technology and successor to the train of progress, escaped
reassessment the car faced safety challenges, air-pollution standards, energy crises,

fuel-efficiency requirements, and a growing awareness in congested cities that the

automobile could no longer substitute for effective mass transit. 1
1. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 49-51)

In all these it can be seen that our reach exceeded our grasp, and our vision as to all the
many and unintentional consequences and spin-offs, was very poor.
In this same essay, Smith gives a definition of technological determinism (we will see
many more of these throughout the essays that follow). I quote his here mainly to give
an introduction to the concept, and to serve as a tool to compare and contrast future
definitions.
Technological determinism is a curious phrase. The fist of it is heartbreaking in its
simplicity: the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in
turn follows an inevitable course 2

In our next essay by Bruce Bimber, entitled Three Faces of Technological

Determinism, he suggests, as the title suggests, he attempts to clear up confusion
created by this deceptively simple phrase, distilling three meanings of technological
determinism, only one of which, he concludes, is truly technological determinism.
Firstly he notes what he calls the normative account, this is the belief that technology
can be considered autonomous and deterministic when the norms by which it is
advanced are removed from political and ethical discourse. 3 Although this definition
may seem to be saying that technology determines all other areas of life, really this
account is saying that technology can (if removed from political and ethical discourse).
We have the power to determine technology, but it also has the power to determine us.
He identifies this position most notably with Jacques Ellul (although its worth noting
that Ellul has a very different notion of technology, or technique, as he called it).

2. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 38)

3. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 82)
Secondly, he coins nomological determinism, a la Peter Van Inwagen, as a belief that,
given the past, and the laws of nature, there is only one possible future. This might
mean that various technological processes, once begun, require forms of organization or
commitments of political resources, regardless of their social desirability [or] It could
mean that an enterprise necessitates subsequent technologies 4
And finally, he notes the unintended consequences account. This account focusses on
the unintended consequences of technological development and (tries) to reason from
there to say that technology (because all of its affects are more often than not,
foreseeable), that technology is deterministic. However, Bimber brushes off this account
as not truly deterministic, and I agree with him. In fact, of the three accounts, the only
one Bimber sees as truly deterministic is the nomological account.

In the next essay, we will look at the concept of technological momentum as defined by
Thomas P. Hughes. I would like to look at his notion of technological determinism as
well as with Bimbers, as ultimately, I find Hughes definition more convincing.
Hughes locates his concept of technological momentum, as between social
constructionism and technological determinism. He writes

4. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 83)

Technological determinism I define simply as the belief that technical forces determine
social and cultural changes. Social construction presumes that social and cultural forces
determine technical change. A more complex concept than determinism and social
construction, technological momentum infers that social development shapes and is
shaped by technology. Momentum also is time dependent 5

Hughes sees both social constructionism and technological determinism as each missing
the whole picture. He disagrees with Marx that water wheels ushered in manorialism or
that steam engines gave birth to bourgeois factories and society, with Lenin who saw
electrification as the bearer of socialism, and White, who saw the invention of the
stirrup as the primary mover toward feudalism. But he also disagrees with Bijker and
Pinch who believe that social or interest, groups define and give meaning to artefacts
(The Gods Must Be Crazy). In defining them, the social groups determine the designs of
artefacts. 6 I believe that Hughes sees this position as an overabundance of the
hermeneutic flexibility of artefacts

Hughes gives numerous examples, one that I particularly found helpful was of Muscle
Shoals Dam.

5. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 102)

6. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 103)

As the loss of merchant ships to submarines accelerated during World War 1, the
United States also attempted to increase its indigenous supply of nitrogen compounds.
Having selected a process requiring copious amounts of electricity, the government had
to construct a hydroelectric dam and power station. This was located at Muscle Shoals,
Alabama, on the Tennessee River. Before the nitrogen-fixation facilities being built near
the dam were completed, the war ended. As in Germany, the supply of synthetic
nitrogen compounds then exceeded the demand. The U.S. government was left not only
with process facilities, but also with a very large dam and power plant.
Muscle Shoals Dam became a solution looking for a problem. How should the power
for the dam be used? A number of technological enthusiasts and planners envisioned the
dam as the first of a series of hydroelectric projects along the Tennessee River and its
tributaries. The poverty of the region spurred them on in an era when electrification was
seen as a prime mover of economic development.
The problem looking for a solution attracted the attention of an experienced problem
solver, Henry Ford, who proposed that an industrial complex based on hydroelectric
power be located along 75 miles of the waterway that included the Muscle Shoals site.
An alliance of public power and private interests with the own plans became the original
component in a hydroelectric, flood-control, soil reclamation, and regional development
project of enormous scope sponsored by Senator George Norris and the Roosevelt
administration and presided over by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The technological
momentum of the Muscle Shoals Dam had carried over from World War 1 to the New
Deal. This durable artefact acted over time like a magnetic field, attracting plans and
projects suited to its characteristics. Systems of artefacts are not neutral forces; they
tend to shape the environment in particular ways. 7

7. (Smith and Marx, 1995, p. 110-111)

Lastly, the works of Marshall McLuhan (whose position I find to be very similar to
Hughes), bears a brief look. McLuhan is probably most well-known for his eponymous
phrase The Medium is the Message. By this, McLuhan hoped to draw attention to the
various designs, programming, and information and conditioning aspects already within
the medium itself (as opposed to the content of the medium. He writes
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The
electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it
is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. The fact, characteristic of all media, means
that the content of any medium is always another medium. What we are
considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or
patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the message of any
medium of technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduced into
human affairs. 8

But lest McLuhans account here seem purely technological deterministic, (its notable
that he was in large part reacting against the multitude of voices who utter the anthem
that technology is neither good nor bad but depends on how it is used), I shall quote
another section where he (quoting G.B. Sansom) discusses money.

8. (McLuhan, 1964, p. 19-20)

The penetration of the money economy, wrong G.B. Sansom (in Japan, Cresset Press,
London, 1931) caused a slow but irreversible revolution, culminating in the breakdown
of feudal government and the resumption of intercourse with foreign countries after
more than two hundred years of seclusion. Money has reorganized the sense life of
peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives. This change does not depend
upon approval or disapproval of those living in the society. 9
I believe that McLuhans account and Hughes account are quite similar, in that they both
avoid extreme reductionism down to either purely social and cultural, or purely
mechanical and technological factors. Rather, they have a more holistic view of both
socio-cultural technological change, making note of complexities and seeing both issues
as interconnected with each other.
This essay has been an attempt to explore the issue of technological determinism,
looking both at its context and various ways in which it has been understood.

9. (McLuhan, 1964, p. 31-32)

Bibliography
Stiegler, Bernard, 2009, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, Stanford University Press,
California.
Smith, Merritt Roe and Leo Marx, 1995, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma
of Technological Determinism, The MIT Press, London.
McLuhan, Marshall, 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Gingko
Press, California.
Ellul, Jacques, 1965, The Technological Society, Lowe and Brydone, Britan.
Mumford, Lewis, 1973, The City in History: its Origins, its Transformations, and its
Prospects, Cox & Wyman Ltd, London.