Technoideology
In response to another of Jeff’s posts:
Well, first a caveat. Let’s not start thinking I’m some sort of Ricean sycophant or something just because two posts today were in reply to Jeff, while another name-checked him. I just happened to find things worth replying to on his blog today. So there.
Jeff responds to an article in the Chronicle; the article (unread by me) is a lamentation of technology’s negative influence on students today. Jeff nicely dissects the argument, finding it ultimately lacking and poorly argued. All well and good, but here’s the bit that got me thinking. Jeff wrote, drawing on a particular bit of the antitech rant:
I don’t need to repeat the response: even the quill was technology. We know that counter-argument already.
Here’s my thoughts. What Jeff doesn’t mention here (although brilliant scholar that he is, I’m sure he thought of it) (okay, maybe a little sycophantic, haha) is that technology comes with its own ideology, right? Our idea of technology contains a narrative of progress and development that perhaps goes unquestioned more often than it should.
And, like any ideology, the technology one is naturalized, so that those technologies we take for granted hardly seem like technologies or ideologies - here, for example, the quill. So the technology narrative is founded in two parts: one, the assumption that progress is good, makes life easier, better, faster. But it also contains (this is the unspoken part of Jeff’s argument, as I read it) a counter-narrative, in which technology is distracting, a nuisance, and needlessly complicated - things were simpler in the good old days.
Of course, one could probably choose any technology and find the counter-argument against it. I remember reading in high school (although the exact source has since faded from memory) turn-of-the-twentieth-century fears that the fountain pen was going to cause schoolboys to forget how to sharpen their quill pens with their pen-knives. So perhaps technology always brings fears of obsolesence - that the technologies we hold dear (and the ideologies they embody) will be rendered obsolete. . .and if they can, we can.
And Plato, lamenting how writing will destroy memory, and Thoreau, whose legacy was in a pencil factory, lamenting technology….or academics in the ’80s lamenting word processing….or growing up in the ’70s with laments over calculators…. the laments feel more like grand-standing or conservative responses. “We want to conserve” something about the past, some imaginary, some “mythology” of our existence. That the “thing” we wish to conserve didn’t exist…that is another matter.
The thing about technology narratives of progress, they are more the darlings of anti-tech rants than those who write on technology. One of the most prominent technology writers, McLuhan, is not a lover of technology (and is very suspicious). But his work to understand social and compositional consequences does not spend its time lamenting something “lost” and praising something “found.”
The other anti-technology rant that is popular is the one that ends w/the call “for critical thinking.” To which I respond, ok: think critically. Is such a rant an example of critical thinking? In cases like the Chronicle’s first person pieces, or Neil Postman, or similar moves: no.
And in the case of literary studies: the emerging technology (it took awhile to settle) of print led to the creation of the novel. The novel, as we forget, was dismissed as trivial and “only for women.” It was a long time before its study was taken seriously and not dismissed as a distraction.
Tell that to a literature dept today.
Comment by jeff — 27 January, 2007 @ 9:07 am