“the belief that technology is the agent of social change” – Andrew, Murphie and John Potts 

Whether one supports this position or not, as culture we almost passively subscribe to it through our use of language.

Potts makes the example of “the computer age” and I would expand on that with phrases like “the digi-age”, “digi-kids”, “tech-savvy” and “social networking”. These are only few of the numerous names we place technology/human relationships and experiences.

Each however, are similar in that they acknowledge an interdependence.

A “digi-kid” is someone who is considered to have been born into technology, those born post 1990 and seem to be able to understand and interact with all types of technology simply by looking at it and playing around with it whilst others may have to take their time reading manuals and instructions. In other words, people who are born with a degree of technological competence or literacy. This certainly does not extend to all people and there is no reason to say you can’t do these things if you were born pre 1990 but that is the general assumption. “Digi-kids” have the advantage of having been exposed to many types of technology from a very young age and have grown up with certain technologies developing alongside them.

For example, the iPhone first released in 2007 is now up to the 5th generation. From iPhone to iPhone 5S. I am now 21 and have seen all generations of the iPhone pass through my family, the first entering the household when I was 14. I can safely say I have learnt to use all simply by touch, never reading any manuals and have taught both my mum and dad how to use them. My 6 year old cousin is now teaching me things about my iPhone that in all these years I didn’t even know it could do.

So what am I really getting at with all this and what has it to do with technological determinism?

Well by illustrating how I learnt to use a smart phone and comparing it the way my parents learnt and again to my younger cousin, you can see that it might be easy to assume technology has had an affect on social change. From my example, one could say technology has changed the way we learn, allowing us to try a much more interactive approach, trialling and testing things and being able to easily undo them as opposed to reading a manual and following very strict instructions. You could also say it is speeding up children’s comprehension abilities (but that’s really another debate).

Using the example of the iPhone maybe I can clarify technological determinism further. The Potts reading talks about Martial McLuhan’s idea that technologies are “extensions of human capacities” and can “alter our perception of the world”. Taking that quite literally, the iPhone contains a camera, and what is a camera or a photo if not and extension of your eyes and memory? and perhaps one way our perception is alter or literally our view of the world is altered, is through the lens of a camera, even further, the frame of a screen on digital frame produced by the things called ‘apps’ like ‘Instagram‘ and ‘Fotor’. Thanks to iPhones, every great night out, pretty sunset or funny moment is trapped into a 10 second video that we can play to others on ‘Snapchat‘ or squeezed into a square frame for Instagram. With our iPhones as the significant medium for sharing our message or experience, we begin to tailor our experience to fit the medium or screen. We start looking at the world in freeze frames or specific shapes and look for things that can be easily and comically captioned.

What i’m getting with all this, (and hopefully you are too), is that technological determinism is really saying that technology has the power to change the way act. It is saying that as technology evolves, it is changing and evolving us. It is defining history by changes in technology rather than changes in us, the human race.

Technological determinists attribute thing like “analytical thinking, artificial memory, abstractions and linearity” to technology rather than humans.