Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 50 (Chellis Glendinning)

Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto (1990)

Background notes:

• European-American author of creative nonfiction, licensed psychotherapist specializing in recovery from post-traumatic stress , and political activist
• pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, a proponent of land-based culture, and a critic of technological society
• Alexander Graham Bell her ancestor. Her brother is named after him: Alexander Bell Glendinning

Reading response:
This was a compellingly clear, short, and succinct article. As such, however, it was not totally convincing. I know that it takes the idea to the extreme, in order to make an argument for people troubled by and resistant to modern technology.

Two sections were particularly interesting to me:

1. Page 604 l-h column, when she states that neo-luddites are not anti-technology but rather that they oppose the kinds of technologies that are destructive to human lives and communities--how can she distinguish in advance that technology will be destructive? We rarely know the potential or unintended uses of some technologies. And what of technologies that have both negative and positive impacts?
   
2. Page 604, "learning to critique technology demands fully examining its sociological context, economic ramifications, and political meanings"--I agree with this. Too often we ignore the negative effects of technology.

I wonder how she would suggest we dismantle nuclear, chemical, genetic, electromagnetic, computer technologies. First, they seem too established within society to be dismantled. Second, I'm not sure it's even physically possible, or a good idea. My father was an engineer who worked with water pollution from some of these technologies. I doubt we could effectively dismantle these technologies without causing more harm to the environment. So perhaps her article should not be taken literally?

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 49 (Michel Foucault)

Panopticism (1978)

Foucault begins this essay with a  discussion of the separation measures taken against people with the plague, and he compares these with those of lepers. Both were separated from society as a result of fear, but plague victims were controlled by segmentation (groupings) and order and discipline and power structures, while lepers were merely separated (individualized). Foucault uses this history to set up how discipline and punishment function in modern society.

Foucault focuses on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Plague measures were needed to protect society: the panopticon allows power to operate efficiently. The panopticon offers permanent visibility, ensuring homogeneous effects of power. Bentham believed that power should be visible and unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but he cannot communicate or see other prisoners, and he never knows whether he is being observed. Foucault points out that the panopticon is a machine for "dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen." He calls it a "laboratory of power"--a place where the machine can be used to carry out experiments using observation. The panopticon is a figure of political technology. I love this passage:

"The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, of making a function function through these power relations" (594-95).

The most fascinating part of the panopticon is this idea that it is a transparent building--"in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole." According to Foucault, our society has moved from one of spectacle to one of surveillance--we are in the panoptic machine. In our time, the state controls such methods of coercion and operates them throughout society. The development of a disciplinary society involves socio-economic factors, particularly population increase and economic development.

Foucault assumes that all citizens of modern society are entitled to make demands on the state. However, he also argues that the state cannot be separated or understood without the mechanisms that also control and examine the citizen. Schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons resemble the panopticon in that they examine pupils, workers, patients, and prisoners--they classify them as individuals and try to make them conform to a norm. And the modern citizen spends much of his life in at least some of these institutions--"we are in the panoptic machine!"

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 48 (Hubert L. Dreyfus)

"Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet" (1999)

Background information:

• professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
• interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence 
• educated at Harvard and considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger
• authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do
• has a reputation as a Luddite, but he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible; only that the current research is fatally flawed. He argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. 

Reading response:
Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard's notion of the dangers and opportunities of the Press to critiques the Internet. He asks, "What contribution can the World Wide Web make to educators?"

In answering this question, Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard's 3 stages--aesthetic, ethical, and religious--to show that only the aesthetic and ethical are possible with information technology, and that the religious is undermined.

He gives several attributes shared between the Press and the Web:

• both level all qualitative disctinctions (all text is equal)
• both create the Public and an absence of responsibility
• both provide anonymity and no risks, which is why we are attracted to them

Dreyfus suggests that the most important commitments in our lives are those that are unconditional--and he gives the following list: politics, religion, love, law (!), and music--because there's risk and loss/grief in losing these things. He asks what role information technology can play in encouraging/supporting unconditional commitments, and concludes that while IT does not prohibit them, it does inhibit them.

I was following along with all of the points of the article, until this last. Dreyfus lost me just before his conclusion, when he states, and I paraphrase:

If Kierkegaard is right, for the cyber-world to avoid despair, it would have to find a way to cancel its risk-free attraction by supporting and encouraging unconditional commitments and strong identities in the real world where risk and disappointment are inevitable. (583)


He goes on to insist that "education at its best must be based on apprenticeship" and that "one can only learn by imitation of the style" of a master. While I recognize the value of learning from mentors, I don't agree with this entirely. What about hackers? What about successful distance education? Aren't these risky and unconditional passions? Or are these the very things Dreyfus means?

I doubt it, given his last sentence: "As far as I can see," [which is a telling statement in itself, I think], "learning by apprenticeship can work only in the nearness of the classroom and laboratory; never in cyberspace." I can't wait to hear some of my classmates refute this! And they will be passionate about it!

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 47 (Albert Borgmann)

"Information and Reality at the Turn of the Century" (1995)

Background information:

• born in Freiburg, Germany, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana
• In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984), he introduced the notion of the device paradigm to explain what constitutes technologies essence as opposed to Heidegger's Gestel (enframing)
• In Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992), describes as a techno-religious book characterized in terms of hyperreality and hyperactivity, he describes hyperactivity as a pathological syndrome of the child and workaholics. He applies hyperactivity to society as a whole, and defines it as "a state of mobilization where the richness and variety of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been suspended to serve a higher, urgent cause"--in other words, the salvation of mankind is a return to the Christian god
• an interesting interview: www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2901
  

Reading response:
In this article, Borgmann suggests there are 3 types of information, the first two old, and the third new:

1. information about reality (which requires comprehension and makes the work more perspicuous). This information informs us of the faraway, but does not transport it into our midst. It is a part of our background and informs our ways of life. The emblem Borgmann offers of this information is the Internet.
   
2. information for reality (which requires translation and realization and makes the world richer and more prosperous). This information requires discipline and skill/competency, and it engenders community and intimacy. This information combines ideas with tangible ingredients from reality. The emblem Borgmann give for this information is a Boeing 777.
3. information as reality (which emerged from our culture of technology, and really includes information as virtual reality--rivaling reality itself). This information serves both utility and consumption and erases the distance between near and far, quantity (signal) and quality (message).

Borgman calls for a turn from information as reality to information and reality. By this he means that information in the Internet age weakens people and attenuates things. He suggests a return to nature to regain the "actuality of people" (577). He seems very much against virtual reality and the realism it can provide.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 46 (Andrew Ross)

"Hacking Away at the Counterculture" (1991)

Background notes:

• chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University
• writing focuses on labor and the work force, from the Western world of business and technology to sweatshop labor in the Third World 
• research interests: labor and work; urban and suburban studies; intellectual history; social and political theory; science; ecology and technology; cultural studies

Reading response:
In this article, Ross is concerned with describing and offering a broader view of hacking than the view that has been established via media commentary (historically, hacking has been equated to body invasions--viruses and worms--and hackers have been depicted ironically as both menaces to society--"juvenile technodelinquents"--and as romantic counterculturalists--"maverick though nerdy cowboys"), causing public alarm and fear. Ross suggests that, rather than the exclusively white, masculine, and middle-class profile, there are wider social locations (such as that of the apprentice technical elite, female high-tech office, and shop-floor worker) and activities (what he terms backing, sabotaging, and reskilling) involved in hacking, that is, if we can recognize this counterculture and expressionism. Unfortunately, our fear makes us feel hopeless and passive (which may be a result of the shift from the 1960s "technology of folklore" to the 1990s "folklore of technology"). Ross advocates a "cultural studies" approach to technology, suggesting that cultural critics should embrace a hacker-like knowledge, "capable of reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies." Ross believes in technoskepticism to move beyond an epistemology of technological determinism. He believes hackers disrupt the system, moving us closer to a technoliteracy.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 45 (Michael H. Heim)

"Heidegger and McLuhan and The Essence of Virtual Reality" (1997)

Heim uses Heidegger, Dreyfus, McLuhan, and Ong as "springboards" for understanding the modern technological revolution and "the new situation of the sciences and the humanities" (539). Heim predicts that by 2000 (only 3 years later), nearly every text will exist in electronic format, and he suggest this is what Heidegger feared: that his work would be mediated by a society consumed with technology. Calling this fear "computer as opponent," Heim first focuses on the perceived danger of computers: that is, if computers can replicate thought patterns, do computers have artificial intelligence? Is it possible for computers to think?

Using Dreyfus's book Mind over Machine and the paradigm of the chess match, to focus on the formal patterns that computers use. Dreyfus believed that computers were limited and that we could not create a lucid computer. But Heim believes this confrontational relationship with computers distracts us from the real issue--how our reality changes as we live and work with computers, or "as Heidegger might put it: ...Being with computers?" Heim believes the relationship between humans and computers is collaborative and describes this as "computers as component."

Heim substitutes Heidegger's term for the "language machine" with word processing--a shift in writing technologies. He uses several impressive metaphors to describe the word processor and computer technology--"calculator of the humanist," "mental prosthesis"--suggesting that writing on this new machince produces a new kind of writing and thinking.

Heim compares Heidegger (1889-1976) with McLuhan (1911-1980) and Ong (1912-2003), suggesting that they all saw technology as an essential component in how we define reality, especially because of its intimacy with language (shifting from a print culture to an electronic medium). Because of this collaboration, or ability to interact with technology, and technology's interaction with us, Heim moves into a discussion of the essence of virtual reality, which he states has at least seven divergent concepts guiding its research:

1. simulation (VR simulates reality)
   
2. interaction (humans interact with VR)
   
3. artificiality (VR is a human construct)
   
4. immersion (sensory immersion in a virtual environment)
   
5. telepresence (real-time, robotic presence in a location without physical, in-the-flesh presence)
   
6. full-body immersion (VR reads body movements)
   
7. networked communications (full immersion + sharing semaphores)

Heim then backtracks to talk about the nasty r-word: REALITY. He gives an impressive one-paragraph "sidebar" (550) of the history of the r-word controversy in order to remind us that defining virtual reality will be as difficult as defining reality has been. He suggests that the essence of VR may lie in art, and he provides several examples of this (Star Trek's Holodeck, the legend of the Holy Grail, Wagner's Parsifal). Believeing that someday VR will elicit similar rave reviews as these art forms, he ends by providing several areas where the new breed of VR artist can succeed and transcend traditional art forms: in activity vs. passivity (VR requires interaction), in manipulation vs. receptivity (VR enhances receptivity by touching or emotionally moving humans), in remote presence (VR offers shift in Western philosophy of presence), and in augmented reality (VR enhances transition from virtual to real, thus enhancing the power of art).

Today's Inspiration: Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

I was totally blown away by this video of Randy Pausch, "Achieving your childhood dreams."

Foundations of Technical Communication: Theory Paper

Assignment: Write a 2500-3000 word paper which should attempt to extend the discussion of a specific topic or theory beyond the scope of class discussions and readings. You may use the same topic researched in your literature review assignment, or select a new topic (with my approval). In addition to including sources from class readings, this paper should incorporate additional research (at least 5-7 sources) to develop its thesis. As a final component of this assignment, you prepare an abstract of the paper (approximately 250 words) as a handout and give a 10-minute presentation of your project on the final day of class. This assignment will take the place of a written final exam. A functional link to this assignment must be posted on the online portfolio by the due date.

Foundations of Technical Communication: Literature Review

Assignment: Selecting a specific research topic or specialization within technical communication, you will write a 2000-word literature review, including a bibliography. Your paper should provide a representative summary of research (books, articles, etc.) published on your topic over the past five years. The paper should identify and discuss significant theories and trends in the selected research area. Additionally, you should also include a few seminal works on your topic outside of the five year range. The paper should include at least 20 sources, excluding book reviews, conference proceedings, and non-refereed Web sites. A functional link to this assignment must be posted on the online portfolio by the due date.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 42 (Carl Mitcham)

"Three Ways of Being-With Technology" (1990)

Background notes:

• Born in 1941, Mitcham is currently Professor of Liberal Arts and International Studies at the Colorado School of Mines
• Mitcham was a conscientious objector during Vietnam War
• Mitcham has worked to promote ethical reflection on technology, and "aspires to advance philosophical, ethical, and policy understanding within the relevant and overlapping professional communities in ways that may deepen democratic public intelligence"
• Mitcham has a long history of work in engineering ethics and the theory and practice of interdisciplinary education and research. Mitcham was also one of the founders of New Directions: Science, Humanities, Policy 

Reading response:

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 29 (Lewis Mumford)

“Tool-Users vs. Homo Sapiens and The Megamachine” (1966)

Background Info:

·         American historian and philosopher of technology and science (1895-1990).

·         Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, had a broad career as a writer and an influential literary critic.

·         influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederic J. Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.

·         In his early writings on urban life, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote that the human race would use electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind. He would later take a more pessimistic stance. His early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Reading Response:
Rather than technology, Mumford concentrates on the term technics (from Greek tekhne) and man’s “work.” He sees technology as part of technics. Technics is uniquely human in that it moves beyond the mere hand’s tool-making to the brain, modifying tools with “linguistic symbols, esthetic designs, and socially transmitted knowledge” (345). In other words, man is not a mere tool-making animal, but a social/cultural being with personality, and this includes even primitive man. The mind controls all of man, not just his hands. Mumford goes one step further to suggest that man’s work has always been less about practical needs (such as control over the environment for food supply) and more about aspirations and symbolic culture.

Mumford believes that the evolution of language was more influential to further human development than any other “tool-making.” To Mumford, overlooking the evolution of language is to “overlook the main chapters of history” (347). Yet in the modern age, Mumford sees technics as disassociating from the larger cultural whole. Technics was “broadly life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered” (347). But once this was established, technics increased the potential for human expression. Spoken language gave man power.

According to Mumford, over 5,000 years ago, “monotechnics” (the real Machine Age) came into existence (348). Monotechnics brought about the first “megamachines”—complex, high-powered, collective machines, and it is a result of their invention that technics became disassociated from “other biological and social activities”  (348), engrossing man’s entire lifetime. This idea of “work” became a curse, according to Mumford, until the invention of the clock in the 14th c. He gives examples of engineering feats—the pyramids—as proof of these new technics. And even though these machines were defective and misused (causing destruction—destroyed cities, poisoned soils, and violence), the collective security and abundance they afforded man outweighed this cost (his comparison of a modern space shuttle with an Egyptian pyramid was particularly striking for me—both are means for reaching the cosmos.) But these costs are tolerable in that the megamachine brings benefits to the community by increasing human effort and aspiration. The orderly, ritualized, repetitive work of the megamachine brought with it a means of self-control , and this unconditional commitment to the megamachine is now regarded as the purpose of human existence, as a result of continued scientific and technical advancements.

Yet the megamachine has a weakness:  it is pre-scientific, nonrational, an agent of arrest and regression. To Mumford, our ability to see this weakness could move technics back into the service of human development (rather than service to the machine). Mumford believes we must redefine work to include “educative, mind-forming, self-rewarding,” voluntary work in our technology-centered lives.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 23 (Martin Heidegger)

"The Question Concerning Technology" (originally published in 1954)

Background notes:

• German philosopher (1889-1976)
• Heidegger joned the National Socialist party in 1933. After the war, he was banned from university teaching on account of his Nazi connections. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1946. He continued to write and lecture on philosophy. 
• "The Question Concerning Technology" emerges out of a series of talks he delivered from 1949 to 1953.
• Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, theology and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Well-known philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Ahmad Fardid, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.
  
• claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it means for something "to be"

Reading Response:
In this work, Heidegger aims to define the essence of modern technology. He believes everything has essence, but that this essence is hidden to humans. To unconceal it, man must "think through still more primally what was primally thought" (259). We can do this through "bringing-forth"--challenging the unconcealment of the essence, rather than merely accepting the concealed (our "stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology" [260]). According to Heidegger, it is only through unconcealment that we can access the truth.

In defining modern technology, Heidegger says we have moved away from a notion of modern technology as mere manufacturing, and he asserts that modern technology, as with the Greek techne, is a bringing-forth, a revealing. He calls technology's essence "Ge-stell [enframing]" (258), which is the way it exists in the world, the way it is able to be seen and understood by humans. Furthermore, "man stands within the essential realm of enframing. He can never take up a relationship to it subsequently" (259). In other words, he is always already "framed, claimed, and challenged" by destining: "Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over men" (260).

However, Heidegger believes we are endangered by the destining of revealing: "man may misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpret it" (260). In addition, when man becomes "nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve" (261),  he becomes even more endangered (on "the brink of a precipitous fall"), namely that "he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve" (261). In other words, at a time when man believes himself to be the supreme being on earth, he will believe everything on earth is his construct. According to Heidegger, this illusion gives rise to a delusion: that man's essence will seem to be everywhere and in everything. However, Heidegger believes the exact opposite: that man "can never encounter only himself" (261). Yet, in spite of (and in the midst of) this danger, Heidegger also sees a saving power; he states: "in technology's essence roots and thrives the saving power" (262) and "the essential unfolding of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power" (263).

Although human activity and achievement can never counter or banish this danger, Heidegger sees our witnessing of the crisis and our potential for reflection (pondering/questioning/thinking about technology) as a means for guarding and preserving essence. In other words, the closer we get to the danger, the more we are able to see the saving power of modern technology.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 21 (Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker)

"The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts" (1987)

Background notes:

• Pinch = sociologist and former chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Cornell University
• Pinch = significant contributor to the study of Sound culture, and his books include a major study of Robert Moog 
• Bijker = Dutch professor, chair of the Department of Social Science & Technology at the Faculty of Arts & Culture in the Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands 
• Bijker = fields of research include social and historical studies of science, technology and society; theories of technology development; methodology of science, technology and society studies; democratisation of technological culture; science and technology policies; ICT, multimedia and the social-cultural dimensions of the information society; gender and technology; and meta studies of architecture, planning, and civil engineering.
• They started the movement known as Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) within the sociology of science. Advocates of SCOT--social constructivists--argue that technology does not determine human action, but that human action shapes technology. They also argue that the ways in which a technology is used cannot be understood without understanding how that technology is embedded in its social context.
• SCOT holds that those who seek to understand the reasons for acceptance or rejection of a technology should look to the social world. It is not enough, according to SCOT, to explain a technology's success by saying that it is "the best"--researchers must look at how the criteria of being "the best" is defined and what groups and stakeholders participate in defining it. In particular, they must ask who defines the technical criteria by which success is measured, why technical criteria are defined in this way, and who is included or excluded. SCOT is not only a theory, but also a methodology: it formalizes the steps and principles to follow when one wants to analyze the causes of technological failures or successes.
  

Reading Response:
Pinch and Bijker are social constructionists (in fact, they started the movement). In their work, they emphasize invention (that science is essentially a human process, rather than predetermined), and they criticize holistic views of technology. Their interest in successes and failures in innovation interested me. By examining the detailed and heterogeneous structure of specific technologies, and focusing on groups of inventors and users, we may be able to see the social negotiations that produce and determine final and accepted facts and artifacts (through a social consensus). Through their integrated approach, using EPOR and SCOT, they suggest that a social study of science and technology will benefit from each other's independent sociologies. This will lead us to a method for determining how (or even whether) we can distinguish science from technology.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 20 (Arnold Gehlen)

"A Philosophical-Anthropological Perspective on Technology" (1965, reprinted 1983)

Background notes:

• German philosopher, sociologist, and philosophical anthropolgist
  
• Many terms from his work, like Reizüberflutung ("Sensory overload"), deinstitutionalization or post-history, have gained popular currency in Germany.
• major influences while studying philosophy were Hans Driesch, Nicolai Hartmann and especially Max Scheler 
• joined the Nazi Party in 1933 
• career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' under Hans Freyer

Reading Response:
Gehlen defines technology as both the actual tools and the skills needed to create and use the tools, allowing humanity to "preserve himself" (213), although he does admit that it is difficult to determine what technology is, which is why it is important to stick with a general definition that includes all concepts. He suggests that our culture has surpassed all previous cultures because we have created an information superstructure, which does not just produce goods but phenomena in the form of sensing and computing devices. Humans, to Gehlen, lack the necessary survival instincts, and so must use their reason and creativity to survive. He says we are dependent on our constructed environment: "although an individual with his natural organic resources and what he might make with his own hands could hold out alone for a while in nature, he could not get through three days in a non-functioning technological-industrial system" (217). (He uses bomb shelters as an example of this.)

What we have created (Gehlen provides Hannah Arendt's view) has become so much a part of our biological makeup, that "it looks as if mankind no longer belongs to a species of mammals, but has instead turned into some kind of shellfish" (217). We are stuck in a world of inequality, war, and dishonesty. Great times of discovery and human advancement, like we are experiencing with technology, bring about population explosions that double in shorter and shorter intervals. As a result,iIndividuals are increasingly dependent upon society and their concerns will become more generalized. For the first time in history, and thanks to the easy communication methods technology provides us (news services, computers) and the population explosion, Gehlen believes it will be possible for humans to accept values--peace, equality, and material and spiritual development--that receive universal assent.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 19 (Stephen J. Kline)

"What is Technology" (1958)

Kline emphasizes the need for a clear definition of technology, however, he identifies a conflict in the attempts to define it: 1) technology is used to describe material things, actions, processes, methods, and systems; and 2) technology is used symbolically to represent procedures and progress. His article is an attempt to "unpack" the term, and in so doing he suggests that there are 4 usages for technology:

1. hardware or artifacts (any thing/end product manufactured by humans)
   
2. sociotechnical system of manufacture (all elements needed to manufacture things)
   
3. knowledge, technique, know-how, or methodology for accomplishing tasks (information, skills, processes, and procedures needed to accomplish tasks)
   
4. sociotechnical system of use (combination of hardware and people to accomplish tasks that we could not perform without such systems, extending human capacities)

In comparing humans to other animals, he states that we are the "only species that purposefully makes innovations in our sociotechnical systems in order to (hopefully) improve their functioning" (212). This "purposeful innovation" separates us from other animals, in Kline's mind, more than any other human characteristic. He calls us "lords of the planet," but states that to rule well, we need to understand the source of our powers and how they are used.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 18 (Hans Jonas)

"Toward a Philosophy of Technology" (1979)

Background notes:

• his The Imperative of Responsibility (German 1979, English 1984) centers on social and ethical problems created by technology
• his work The Phenomenon of Life (1966) forms the philosophical undergirding of one major school of bioethics in America
• Jonas's career is generally divided into three areas: studies of gnosticism, studies of philosophical biology, and ethical studies
• mother was sent to the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp
  

Reading response:
Jonas begins with a conviction that philosophy and technology obviously go hand in hand.  He uses the metaphor of "form" vs. "matter"  to distinguish between "formal dynamics" of technology (laws, abstract movement),  the "substantive content" of technology (techniques/tools/actions/pragmatic uses), and a third, overarching theme, that of the moral or ethical side of technology (human responsibility).

The majority of the discussion centers around a comparison of pre-modern and modern technology.

According to Jonas, traits of pre-modern technology include:

• possession and state
• inventory of tools and procedures
• constant, mutually-adjusting, stable, equilibrium
• linear
• tool-based
• revolutions occured by accident, not design
• developments just happened, not consciously created
• technical breakthroughs were jealously guarded monopolies of inventor communities
  
• tools, techniques, and objectives remained essentially the same
• improvements were sporadic and unplanned
• no proclaimed idea of a future of constant progress
• no deliberate method-like approach
• no "natural science: as a growing body of theory

Traits of modern technology include:

• an enterprise and a process
• tends not to approach an equilibrium or saturation point, but gives rise to further steps in all directions
• fluid and circular
• constant future repetition of inventive activity (no knowledge hoarding) 
• spreads quickly though the world (via universal intercommunication and pressures of competition)
• progress-driven (a later stage is always superior to an preceeding stage)
• always evolving
• has a dynamic thrust (not tool-based)
• restlessness

In the modern technology description, one area  seemed particularly important: that of ever-evolving technology (technology as evolution). Jonas suggests that this constant need for evolution leads us to a restless nature with technology. He provides several causes for this restlessness: pressure of competiton, war, population growth, impending exhaustion of natural resources, and technology itself. It is the "pull of the quasi-utopian vision of ever better life" that technology has provided us a glimpse of, but Jonas questions whether we really need progress beyond necessity, stating "perhaps the odds for stabilization look somewhat better in a socialist system, provided it is worldwide."

He suggests there are two convictions: 1) technology can be an indefinite progress because there is always something new and better to find, and 2) technology tailored to knowledge of this potential ensures its indefinite, exhausting potential. He believes an answer lies in the interaction of science and technology (rather than a distinction between the two, as some philosophers contend). He suggests that knowledge--the cognitive process--moves by interaction with technology, and therefore science must generate increasingly sophisticated technologies as its tools to keep knowledge flowing. Technology and science need and propel the other (truth alone will not suffice).

Jonas implies that the divide between theory and practice has vanished--news that should shock and please technical communicators, as the debates between academy and industry rage on. According to Jonas, aristocratic "knowing for its own sake" is gone, replaced by a socializing of the theoretical realm. Technology has mediated this thirst--look at this blog, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging--people are sharing knowledge more than ever before! Collectively, we have power, which Jonas states, "can now be seen as the chief vocation of mankind."

Jonas discusses the new kinds of commodities technology has brought about--machines--unnatural things like plastics, airplanes, architectural structures, automobiles, household appliances, and most importantly electronics. Electricity, and the products produced as a result of it, are, to Jonas, revolutionary and the first truly abstract object (dismebodied, immaterial, unseen) of modern technology. Its invention provides us with a shift from material, tool-based devices, to powerful, cognitive, knowledge-based devices: "electronics signifies a new phase of scientific-technological revolution.... Electronics indeed creates a range of objects imitating nothing and progressively added to by pure invention."(From this point on, Jonas continually uses the phrase "communication engineering," for which I want to substitue "technical communication" throughout.)

The article here turns to Jonas's concerns for technological advancement and ethics. He is troubled by the intersection of technology with biology, particularly genetic programming, and a metaphysical neutralizing of man. He worries that if we use technological power to "tinker with the elemental keys on which life will have to play its melody for generations to come," then consideration should be given to what humans want (consent?). Philosophy, according to Jonas, is not prepared to tackle this task.

While genetics research has certainly moved forward since Jonas wrote this (...Octomom!), his concerns for the quality of human life and its preservation still ring true. He calls for us, whether we are creators or users of technology, to bear the responsibility of freeing ourselves from the determinism we have created. He identifies the problem not so much as complacency or apathy, but our daily consumer existence. Can we be unselfish against our short-term goals of need to embrace long-term insight into survival and averting disaster? Who among us has this power?

Jonas believes we can avert disaster, with the help of philosophers and the removal of power players. Averting disaster takes precedence over all else, otherwise human life will fail to exist. Ethical conduct may have to take a backseat when we are sitting in a lifeboat. Jonas appeals to us to never let the lifeboat situation arise for humanity. He believes ethics of technology can guard a world in which ethics are able to continue to operate.