This week’s symposium was a bit of a mind warp. The idea of technologies being neutral, or not neutral, was the driving idea of the discussion. As it went, Pott and Murphy identified some technologies as being ‘neutral’, but how can a technology be neutral if it was built for a particular purpose?

Firstly, I think Jason’s idea of some technologies being more neutral than others makes the most sense. He thought about it in terms of the internet; since it has so many different ways of employment, it must be MORE neutral than technologies with specific purposes.
Secondly, neutrality is a difficult word. Saying that a technology is ‘neutral’, to me, isn’t etymologically correct unless we are talking about war or someone’s opinion. For this statement to make sense, I think we need to say: “This technology is neutral in terms of […]“. If we continue with the symposium’s hammer example, surely a club hammer is more neutral than a claw hammer. One has a single purpose whereas the other has two.

Neutrality is a point on a spectrum, what that point is is often very ambiguous. But I don’t think it’s correct for Adrian to say that there simply are no neutral technologies, because that undermines the very nature of the word ‘neutral’.