Notes from Questioning Technology -- Preface

"The Ruskins and Heideggers deplored the dehumanizing advance of the machine while democrats and socialists cheered on the engineers, heroic conquerors of nature. However, all agreed that technology was an autonomous force separate from society, a kind of second nature impinging on social life from the alien realm of reason in which science too finds its source. For good or ill, technology's essence--rational control, efficiency--ruled modern life" (vii).

"Insofar as we continue to see the technical and the social as separate domains, important aspects of these dimensions of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society. The fate of democracy is therefore bound up with our understanding of technology. The purpose of this book is to think that vital connection" (vii).

"I offer here a concrete alternative to the approach of such influential represtatives of essentialism as Ellul, Borgmann, Heidegger, and, for reasons I will explain in chapter one, Habermas as well" (viii).

"Essentialism holds that technology reduces everything to functions and raw materials. Goal oriented technological practices replace practices which embody a human meaning. Efficiency sweeps away all other norms and determines an autonomous process of technological development. From this standpoint any attempt to infuse the technical with meaning appears as external interference in a rational field with its own logic and laws. Yet rational though it may be, technology engulfs its creators, threatening both spiritual and material survival" (viii).

"On the one side, technology undermines traditional meanings or communicative action, while on the other side we are called to protect the integrity of a meaningful world. Because the essence of technology is unaffected by changes in particular technologies, technological reform is irrelevant to the philosophical issues, desirable though it may be, on practice grounds. Universal technologization must be resisted by drawing boundaries around the technical sphere" (ix).

"This, I think, points to the basic weakness of essentialism. It has produced a powerful critique of the obsession with efficiency that is indeed prevalent in our society and reflected in the design of many devices and systems, but it has not shown that that attitude reveals the essence of real technology as it has existed historically, as it exists today, and as it may exist in the future. If essentialism is unaware of its own limitations, this is because it confounds attitude with object, the modern obsession with efficiency with technology as such" (x).

"There are, as essentialists argue, technological masters who relate through rational planning to a world reduced to raw materials. But ordinary people do not resemble the efficiency oriented system planners who pepper the pages of technology critique. Rather, they encounter technology as a dimension of their lifeworld. For the most part they merely carry out the plans of others or inhabit technologically constructed spaces and environments. As subordinate actors, they strive to appropriate the technologies with which they are involved and adapt them to the meanings that illuminate their lives. Their relation to technology is thus far more complex than that of dominant actors (which they too may be on occasion.)" (x-xi).

"Lifeworld meanings experienced by subordinate actors are eventually embodied in technological designs; at any given stage in its development, a device will express a range of these meanings gathered not from 'technical rationality' but from past practices of its users" (xii).

"Thus what essentialism conceives as an ontological split between technology and meaning, I conceive as a terrain of struggle between different types of actors differently engaged with technology and meaning" (xiii).

"I argue that the invariant elements of the constitution of the technical subject and object are modified by socially specific contextualizing variables in the course of the realization of concrete technical actors, devices, and systems. Thus technologies are not more efficient devices or efficiency oriented practices, but include their contexts as these are embodied in design and social interaction" (xiii).

"Real change will come not when we turn away from technology toward meaning, but when we recognize the nature of our subordinate position in the technical systems that enroll us, and begin to intervene in the design process in the defense of the conditions of a meaningful life and a livable environment. This book is dedicated to that project" (xiv).

"The process is intermittent and conflictual today, but it is reasonable to suppose that social control of technology will eventually spread and be institutionalized in more durable and effective forms" (xv).