Technology

These are the first and last paragraphs from my paper on Langdon Winner's The Whale and the Reactor for Communication and Culture: Concepts of freedom. Just a taste.


    As human beings we live in a world of our own making, filled and bound with tools and meanings.  Technology plays an integrally influential role in the everyday lives of people, allowing individuals to extend their skills and abilities beyond strict biological limitations.  These cultural artifacts not only aid humans, but also help to shape the very nature of social and cultural constructions, and are actually “forms of life” (as Langdon Winner argues in The Whale and the Reactor) full of obligations and structuring.  The typical conception of technology pushes tools outside the limits of critical analysis and constrains it as an expansion of freedom that is generally used for “good.”  Winner, however, looks more critically at these tools and explores the sway that technological systems hold over society in shaping what will come. He argues that careful examination of systems is vital in choosing the type of society we want to build and “the kinds of people we want to become” (Winner, 52).
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    While technological determinism would argue that the problems with technology are existent but unavoidable, Winner advocates that a critical evaluation of technology should be made, especially at the onset of a new innovation.  He sees great promise in the way people can use democratic power and voice to look at and express their opinions about technologies. Through this process people can change the outcome of technology and therefore the future of society.  In this planning ahead, critical analysis, democratic empowerment, and technologic control, Winner sees the ability society has to choose technologies complementary to its way of life.  By such choices and expansions upon itself, the people reclaim agency: They are able to choose who they want to be and the society they want to create.  They are able to steer their Platonic sea vessel.  While technology will always dialectically affect and construct the way people go about their lives if individuals are able to look into the innovations, they will be able to choose and pursue their own destiny.