The Nature of Technology

A good portion of my life is lived on-line. It might even be said that I live a double life, part of it with family, friends, and co-workers in the immediate, material world, and another part with circles of family, friends, and co-workers on the net. Not only am I connected to other people, but I am also connected to a collection of tools and resources that help me in my day-to-day life. For example, I use hypertext as a thinking tool for producing and developing my ideas; I use the Web as a canvas for mapping and presenting myself and my work; and I use a smart phone not only to keep in touch, but also to manage my time and organize my projects.

Yet, as I write, I realize that I must detail the nature of my on-line relationships, both with these people and with these tools, in order to validate them. After all, how can these friendships be true if I never see the people I claim to love? How can I justify exchanging texts with my father when he lives only two blocks away from my apartment? How can I have a successful working relationship with an individual who lives in another country? How can these demanding, maddeningly opaque technological tools help me do anything except waste time?

If you feel that these questions are no-brainers, with obvious and unextraordinary answers, then you are at least familiar with the rhetoric behind a now-familiar pro-computing credo. More specifically you will recognize the key ideas of the global village and the use of high technology tools to improve life, to connect people to people, to promote freedom of expression, and to increase learning. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, neatly sums up every aspect of pro-technology rhetoric in the introduction to his book Being...

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...to begin. Neither liberation nor oppression can become living powers in any soil except that of the human heart. As soon as we put the matter this way, however, we can begin to talk about the "nature" of the Net. Not some absolute, intrinsic nature, to be sure, but an established character -- a kind of active willfulness -- that ultimately derives from our character. ...We should not ask, "Is technology neutral?" but rather, "Are we neutral in our use of technology?" (Talbott 127)

Works Cited

Birkets, Sven. "The Electronic Hive: Two Views." Harper's, (May 2009).

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Random House, (2011).

Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Random House, (2012).

Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil. New York: Doubleday, (2012).

Talbott, Stephen L. The Future Does Not Compute. New York: O'Reilly & Associates, (2011).