Tag Archives: technology

Thoughts

Technological Neutrality

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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’.

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Reading reflections

Technology for the Mind

Vannevar Bush supports a very interesting contention that never even crossed my mind in his discussion entitled ‘As We May Think”. By today’s standards, advances in technology allow us to control so much of the material aspects of our world, while human knowledge and the mind is still something that is so uncontrollable. Bush points out that while scientific exploits have pushed the boundaries of human physical capabilities, the methods of reviewing and transmitting the results of research are still generations old, and by now “totally inadequate for its purpose”.

People who conscientiously try to keep up to date with worldly events through habitual readings will often not be able to recall the information they learnt the previous month. This is because we still use the same means to record the ephemeral experiences of human thought and action as we did centuries ago.

Nonetheless, Bush rebukes this by adding that we are at a frontier and that this kind of technological advancement for the mind is imminent.

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