Forum 3: One Does Not Simply Use a Technology
Before class: Read One Does Not Simply Use a Technology.
In class: You’ll receive a paper with the discussion questions below. In small groups, talk through the questions, annotate the paper with your group’s thinking, and compare notes with another group. Before you leave, take a photo of your annotated paper (with everyone’s name on it) and upload it to Moodle.
Discussion Questions
- The article argues that no technology is neutral: to use one, you have to submit to its built-in “grammar” and to the vast network of infrastructure behind it. Before reading this, would you have described programming languages, IDEs, libraries and functions as “neutral tools”? Does thinking of them as something you’re submitting to, rather than simply using, change that?
- Drawing on Langdon Winner’s idea of “reverse adaptation,” the author argues tools often reshape our goals instead of just serving them. Can you think of a time a tool you were using — an app, a template, an AI assistant — quietly changed what you were trying to accomplish, rather than just helping you accomplish it?
- To help us trying to figure out all of this in programming, try to make a list or sketch a network all the technologies, infrastructures and protocols that you think that are involved in a simple Python program. Try to go as far as possible in the chain of information, materiality, regulations, institutions, companies. Can you think about something that would come up in this list/network that would affect you or your neighbor considerably? (Ethically, socially, psychologically, etc?)
- The article’s conclusion, echoing Jacques Ellul and classical Christian theology, is that technology is neither purely good nor purely bad but ambiguous — “the world is both good and broken.” Given how deeply (and often invisibly) we’re embedded in these networks, how do you personally hold that tension without either shrugging it off or feeling paralyzed by it? Which compromises should we be willing to make and which shouldn’t we when we enter these “sociotechnical networks”?
Submission
Take a photo of your group’s annotated discussion paper — make sure every group member’s name is on it — and upload it to Moodle by the end of class.