This week’s lecture allowed me to revisit certain communication theories I studied in Year 12. One that I didn’t study was ‘technological determinism’, which is “a reductionist theory that presumes that a society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values.”

It all sounds a bit communistic, so it was no surprise to find out from further research that thy lord and saviour Karl Marx brought this idea to prominence. In a more contemporary setting, writer Nicolas Carr explores technological determinism in his 2008 essay ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid’

Carr basically says technology leads to deception. The rise of the digital age has resulted in a shift in the way we think, and thus, has changed the way society and culture develops. Here’s an excerpt:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going – so far as I can tell – but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”