Philosophy of Technology: Bob Johnson

User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts (1998)

Reading Response: Preface-chapter 2:

Preface: Johnson summarizes previous philosophers approaches to technology, including that of Winner (based on limits), Mitcham (taxonomy bridging applied and intellectual), Feenberg (critical theory), and Wacjman (feminisim). Johnson is the first person we’ve read who explicitly addresses TC in the discussion of philosophy and technology. He asks, “where are the technical communicators in this important field of scholarship?” (xiii). He defines the audience for the book as scholarly and workplace technical communicators, researchers and teachers of rhetoric and composition, and scholars of technology studies.

Part I of the book is titled “Situating Technology,” and it consists of two chapters that deal with the “mundane” (or everyday) uses of technology and a user-centered rhetorical model for technology. Johnson suggests that users of technology live in a world of the mundane—technology has become so much a part of our lives, that it is hidden from view, blending into the backdrop of our everyday lives. He believes there has been a value-shift from everyday knowledge, or know-how, to knowledge in the machine  or the system. He cites Michel de Certeau (ironically I just downloaded his book onto my Kindle), who says know-how has become folklore, and as such, the appreciation of know-how and use has been lost and is part of our collective unconscious. Johnson suggests that rhetoric can be used to resurrect this lost knowledge and make it visible.

Johnson points out that within our knowledge of the mundane, we often act and “do” as specialists, but we are not allowed such knowledge because we received this knowledge in the practice of our everyday lives, not as part of a formal education. He suggests this is a reversal of “theory then practice” to “practice then theory,” and asks “what would it mean to our educational insitututions … if we made the knowledge of know-how visible within the confines of the academy?” I would argue that the TCR program does exactly this. We study both theory and practice, we apply theory to practice and vice versa. Seems to me to be a question of the chicken or the egg…. Using Aristotle as a historical guide, Johnson suggests that we, as users of technology, are empowered by our role as users and that we will need to theorize the mundane—aka revalue and refigure technological development from a user’s perspective.

In chapter 2, Johnson explains how modern technology has been mostly centered on techne—the technological system or artifact itself, with inventors or developers as those who know best about use. He offers a new model of technological development based on rhetoric with users as the “end,” which he calls a “user-centered rhetorical complex of technology.” He argues for users as an integral, participatory force in the process, and using Beniger and Norman’s user-centered models and Richards and Kinneavy’s rhetorical triangles as building blocks, he places users at the center of his new, more complex, iterative model (p. 39). While he acknowledges the shortcomings of any theoretical construct or metaphor, his “complex” can serve a heuristic for analyzing technological artifacts and processes, and a mode for exploring people--inventors, designers, users, and luddites—who make, design, use, or destroy technologies.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 55 (Feenberg)

"Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom" (1992)

Feenberg gracefully discusses and critiques many of the authors we're read this semester, along with other major technology & society thinkers (Marx, Weber, Heidegger, Ellul, McLuhan, Pinch & Binker, Marcuse, Braverman & Noble, Foucault), as well as some of the -isms we have discussed (socialism, determinism, Luddism, constructivism, rationalism, hacktivism).

His main point is to ask why democracy hasn't, after years of struggle, been extended to a technical public sphere? Does technology exclude democracy, or has technology been used to suppress democracy?

He believes this hasn't happened for two reasons: 1) modern technology is incompatible with workplace democracy, and 2) technology is not responsible for the concentration of industrial power. He believes that given a different social context, that it is very likely that modern technology could be operated democratically.

He rejects technological determinism and and neutrality. He argues that modern forms of hegemony are based on the technical mediation of social activities, and he calls for radical technical and political changes for true democratization of our society.

Feenberg makes a point to define hegemony as he will use the term: "a form of domination so deeply rooted in social life that it seems natural to those it dominates" (657). He also uses many useful examples to elucidate his points, such as:

• Pinch & Bijker's bicycle example to illustrate constructtivism, 
• the Factory Bill of 1844 and indeterminism, 
• the Teletel and Minitel to show the complexity of the relationship between the technical function and meaning/unintended uses of the computer, 
• Braverman & Nobleman's example of the assembly line/child labor case and production technologies as examples of technological rationality,
• the environmental movement and social relativity of efficiency, 
• bursting steamboat boilers to explain the "technical code"/standards that mediate how technology adapts to social change
• hackers (such as the AIDs patient movement that destabilized and exposed the medical system) as innovative public reactions to subvert the technical practices, procedures, and designs structuring social life

He suggests two reasons for the faith in technological progress: technical necessity and efficiency. But he argues that these are false ideologies and that we can achieve a new type of technological society that can support a broader range of values through democracy. But what does he mean by democratizing technology? The change is not possible without initiative, participation, and resistance to technological hegemony. A broader understanding of technology can cause a shift in social values (rationalization based on responsibility for humanity and technical actions). Feenberg calls this "technological rationalization" because it requires technological advances that can only be made in opposition to the dominant hegemony. It represents an alternative to the doom and gloom of determinism.

I found many useful passages for my paper/research on mobile devices. Some notes:

"A fuller picture is conveyed ... by studying the social role of the technical object and the lifestyles it makes possible.... It makes technology's contextual causes and consequences visible rather than obscuring them behind an impoverished functionalism" (656)

"differences in the way social groups interpret and use technical objects are not merely extrinsic but make a difference in the nature of the objects themselves. What the object is for the groups that ultimately decide its fate determines what it becomes as it is redesigned and improved over time. If this is true, then we can only understand technological development by studying the sociopolitical situation of various groups involved with it" (657)

I look forward to reading his books.

Philosophy of Technology: Haraway Response

"A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991)

 Background info on Haraway 

 

Reading Response:

A manifesto is a call to action, a verbal slap, an effort to use language to bring about change, and in Haraway’s case, political change. Haraway's essay is a response to those who (during the 1970s and 1980s) sought to define what woman truly is, believing that if the identity of woman could be defined, then a ground of collective political action might be secured (known as "identity politics"). Haraway finds this problematic and proposes instead that we are all hybrids.

She attempts to create what she calls "an ironic political myth" which combines postmodernism with socialist feminism. First, she introduces and defines the "cyborg." A cyborg is a:

• Cybernetic organism
• Hybrid of machine and organism
• Creature of both fiction and lived social reality

The cyborg for Haraway is a metaphor for the postmodernist interest in identity as well as the reality of living with new technology. The cyborg is a direct result of a world that has begun to live within and alongside machines—the line between the human body and the machine has been blurred. And it is a product of new media convergence (a result of cyberspace, artificial limbs, pacemakers, chat rooms).

Haraway is interested in revealing the ambiguity and irrelevance of nature-culture binarisms in the cyborg age. In fact, she also reveals that "natural" was never even so. She charts the differences between "comfortable old hierarchical dominations" (432) which have the appearance of "naturalness" since they are so embedded in our Western cultural consciousness, and the "scary new networks"(432) which came about after World War II. Haraway’s chart allows her to point out the problems with assumptions of a "natural" past: “the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as ‘natural’, a realization which subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’" (433).

The cyborg, according to Haraway, resists what has gone before; it is more than the sum of its parts. In addition, the cyborg "is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (430).

Haraway feels that there are three major boundary breakdowns in the formation of the cyborg. The first is between human and animal: "Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science"(431). The result is human animality or animal human.

The second boundary breakdown is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Not only are our household machines becoming more autonomous and taking on personalities and human features, but humans are coupling with machines for medical purposes (pacemakers, dialysis, artificial limbs and joints, hearing aids) and for research purposes (as is the case with Kevin Warwick, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick.html).

The third boundary breakdown is between the physical/organic/animate and nonphysical/inorganic/inanimate. Haraway notes: "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile…. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque"(431). Today’s machines are ubiquitous and invisible; they carry huge amounts of data on tiny chips hidden somewhere behind an attractive surface. This ethereal invisibility renders machines potent weapons: "They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation"(432).

Haraway attemps to use the cyborg myth as “one important route for reconstructing socialist-femminist politics” (434) by seeing from two perspectives: 1) that “a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” and 2) that “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints"(432). The solution, she suggests, is to see from both perspectives at once (double vision); to be aware and critical of both aspects of the cyborg in the development of political identity. “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common [feminist] language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”

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).

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 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.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 17 (Kristin Shrader-Frechette)

"Technology and Ethics" (1992)

Background notes:

• research analyzes mathematical, biological, or ethical problems in risk assessment, public health, or
  environmental justice – especially those related to radiological, ecological, and energy-related risks
  
• this is a well-known summary of what is perhaps the most popular philosophical treatment of technology--an ethical evalutation

Reading Response:
Because of the expansion of ethical concepts as a result of new technology, Shrader-Frechette suggests that those who study technology and ethics need both technical and philosophical skills. She states that philosophical questions about technology and ethics fall into one of at least 5 categories:

1. conceptual and metaethical questions (e.g., definitions)
   
2. general normative questions (e.g., human rights/duties)
   
3. particular normative questions about specific technologies (e.g., liability)
   
4. questions about ethical consequences of technology (e.g., civil liberties, less safe regulations)
   
5. questions about ethical justifiability of various methods of technological assessment (e.g., analysis and methods assessment)

She moves on to define (a common theme/word in these readings), evaluate, and assess technological risk. In her definition, which starts with a probability of physical harm, she explains that technological risk cannot be defined purely quantitatively, and that it includes qualitative factors. (This is especially interesting to me in that it relates to tech comm research methods, and the need for quantitative and qualitative research to triangulate a study.) Shrader-Frechette points out that, to some philosophers, an equitably distributed technological risk could be more desirable that a quantitatively smaller one that is inequitably distributed.

In the same manner as Ellul, Shrader-Frechette talks about probabilistic uncertainty--because we have limited experience with these new technologies, the probability of risk or even fatality, for example, is difficult to determine. And like Ellul, she suggests that we rely on the subjective probabilities of experts, or we should assume that all probabilities are likely (negative or positive). She warns us of an "overconfidence bias"--that there will be no serious health consequences or accidents as a result of a given technology. In other words, doubt is good.

Shrader-Frechette touches on the ethical debates of due process and risk assessment. As for due process, she states that ethicists believe that technology threatens due process rights; due process is impossible for some fatalities in that the victim cannot be compensated for a death. As for risk assessment, Shrader-Frechette explains that philosophers and policy makers argue about how much risk is acceptable through classic discussions of utilitarian vs. egalitarian ethical debates. Philosophers are divided on how to evaluate negligible risks, in particular. (For example, if a new drug or therapy helps a large population of, say, cancer victims, but a few have terrible, even fatal side effects, is the drug unethical? Do we let the individual decide, or should there be some ethical standard/guideline?)

This leads us to her last point--consent to risk. If an individual consents to a drug, a risky job, or a toxic living condition, have they truly consented? Shrader-Frechette worries that people may not be adequately informed about (or compensated for--e.g. "compensating wage differentual") the risks they take on. Obviously, this is where technical communication could get involved: in helping the public make informed decisions about their consent.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 16 (Jacques Ellul)

"On the Aims of a Philosophy of Technology" (preface to The Technological Society, 1954, 1963, and 1964)

Background notes on Ellul:

• French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, theologian, and Christian anarchist 
• approached technology from a deterministic viewpoint
• constant concern with the emergence of a "technological tyranny" over humanity
  
• exemplifies the global, holistic approach of continental philosophers, but also denies that this makes his work either speculative or evaluative, but entirely descriptive
• deliberately avoids offering ethical and aesthetic evaluations of technology
• accuses those who read him as negative or pessimistic as simply reacting to their own prior value commitments
• describes technology as, at best, a sociological abstraction and not a real phenomenon (those who believe it is real reveal their commitment to methodological individualism) 

Reading Response:
In this preface, Ellul is concerned with explaining the goals of his book and what it will not attempt to do. He states that he is not interested in describing techniques, providing a balance sheet of technological accomplishments, or making ethical or aesthetic judgments on technique. He cannot do these things because, he believes, no one is capable of giving a true account of the total effect of technological techniques as a result of their own point of view inevitably interfering. Instead, he claims he has attempted to present a concrete and fundamental interpretation of technique, based on description only.

He starts with a definition, arrived at by examining activities and observing techniques: "technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity." He emphasized the sociological aspect of technique, or the effect of technique on social relationships, political structures, and economics--every factor in the life of modern man.

In focusing only on the descriptive, Ellul suggests that he should not be considered a pessimist, as readers who suggest so are making value judgements and not concerned with knowing whether things are factual or not. He insists that he is not interested in proving anything, only in performing sociological reflection (not individual action). He does not believe that the individual exerts any control over social, political, or economic mechanisms. As he sees it, individual decisions are made within a framework or collective reality, and therefore no reference to individual agency is made (even though he does acknowledge that individuals are more determined, albeit differently determined, than in the past). Ellul believes it is an illusion to think that we are free from society's taboos. Rather, we are simply conditioned by something new: technological civilization. We have simply moved from one set of determinants to another.

In response to accusations of fatalism, Ellul counters that man is only helpless if he abdicates his responsibilities by living a trivial existence by not taking a stand against these determinants in our technological civilization. However, he can only provide us with a probable evolution: he cannot know whether individuals will follow this advice, and therefore it is probable that man will not pull himself together and assert himself.

In response to accusations of pessimism, Ellul acknowledges that he has no solution to put forth, as any solution would be idealistic, fanciful, and even dishonest. He asks many questions, though, as he believes one must diagnose the problem before one can treat it. Thus his interest in a working procedure, starting with a description of the facts, which can lead to analysis and posing problems, which will finally lead to solutions.


He calls for each of us (not just scholars or experts) to seek ways to resist and transcend technological determinants. He even goes as far as to challenge the US Constitution when he states, "freedom is not an immutable fact graven in nature and on the heart of man. It is not inherent in man or in society, and it is meaningless to write into law." He insists that freedom is meaningless and only found in overcoming and transcending determinisms, representing victory over necessity. In other words, freedom is an act, not a right. We decide to be free from something. To Ellul, the first act in freeing man from the determinism of technology is by becoming aware of its essence and by the need to transcend it.

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 15 (Mario Bunge)

"Philosophical Inputs and Outputs of Technology" (1979)

Background notes on Bunge:

• former physicist and disciple of Karl Popper (commitment to general systems theory)
• vocal participant in "Science Wars:
• opponent of Romanticism and anti-technological attitudes on philosophy
• severe critic of social constructivist and hermeneutical approaches to technology
• critical of pragmatism 

Reading Response: 
Through a metaphor on philosophical "inputs" and "outputs" (because technology is both a consumer [input] and producer [output] of philosophical ideas, Bunge states that technology is a major part of contemporary culture. As such, he believes, philosophers must pay more attention to it than ever before, attempting to define what technology includes in order to understand it. According to Bunge, technology is a field of research that "aims at the control or transformation of reality whether natural or social." In other words, pure science makes changes to achieve knowledge, while technology uses knowledge in order to provoke change.

Bunge identifies 4 branches of technology: material (physical, chemical, biochemical, and biological), social (psychological, psychosociological, sociological, economic, warfare, and futurology), conceptual (computer sciences), and general (theories). Among these branches, he states that most technological ideas are found in policy- and decision-making, and in research, allowing it to have a creative component. By comparing scientific and technological research, he finds that, while both are goal-oriented, they have different goals (scientific research seeks truth for truths sake, while technological research seeks useful truth). However, he criticizes idealistic philosophers and pragmatists for neglecting the conceptual side of technology when they focus only on its coarse, practical or material outputs.

Bunge identifies several neighbors with technology, such as industrial civilization and modern culture,  pseudoscience and pseudotechnology, mathematics, arts, and humanities. Having placed technology within these other fields, he moves on to explain what technology shares with pure science: epistemological assumptions from realism and metaphysics of science.

Epistemological assumptions:

1. there is an external world
2. the external world can be known, if only partially
   
3. every piece of knowledge can be improved upon if we care to

In this framework, he compares classical and modern technologists. (Classical = realist, but naive in that he believe what he sees to be accurate representations. Modern = realist, but critical in that he realizes that our theories are symbolic and over-simplified representations, and tempered by pragmatist attitude.)

Metaphysics of Technology:

1. the world is composed of things
2. things get together in systems (and some are isolated)
3. all things fit into objective stable laws
4. nothing comes out of nothing and nothing goes over into nothingness
5. determination is often multiple and problematic rather than simple or linear

With the use of technology, he points of the following theories:

1. man can deliberately alter natural processes
2. man can create or wipe out entire natural kinds
3. because man can control these things intellectually through the use of technology, there is a need for a philosophy of technology distinct from that of other sciences

Because technology consumes and produces its own philosophical ideas, it is imperative, in Bunge's view, to consider ethics, especially the dubious morals found in technology--uses for good and unforseen uses for evil. He lists previous maxims (guided or misguided) of the technological process, and then calls for a new ethical code of technology, one that does not condone the "dark side" of technology. Such a code should, in his view, consist of an individual (personal responsibility) and a social (policy makers) ethical code. He states that such a two-tiered code would not tolerate double ethical standards.