First reading: Chandler, D. (2002). Technological determinism. Web essay, Media and Communications Studies, University of Aberystwyth, http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html
I'm excited to see language and vocabulary to help me better understand why I pause at the 'technology is a tool' mantra I often hear from educators presenting their views on using or not using technology with their students.
Technological determinists often seem to be trying to account for almost everything in terms of technology: a perspective which we may call technocentrism. To such writers we are first and foremost Homo faber - tool-makers and tool-users. The American Benjamin Franklin apparently first coined the phrase that 'man is a tool-using animal'. Thomas Carlyle echoed this in 1841, adding that 'without tools he is nothing; with them he is all.'
And earlier in the essay...
As the social critic Lewis Mumford has noted, one reductionist tendency is the identification of technology with tools and machines. This is merely, as he put it, 'to substitute a part for the whole' (in Pursell 1994, p. 26), because technology includes the whole of our material culture, not only tools and machines. It is also worth noting (as Carroll Pursell observes), that this reductionist interpretation involves a masculinization of technology. Just as the penis is sometimes referred to as a tool, so tools can be seen as symbolically phallic. Such symbolism has generated profound cultural reverberations.
Reducing the role technology has in our lives and schools to tools, or more generally objects, oversimplifies the position and interdependence humans and technology share. And making technology masculine is just plain messed up interesting. I asked Siri. She totally agrees.
