Does Technology Drive History? Essay -- History Technology Essays

A theme that appears everywhere and over in discussions about technology is whether or not technology is the bewilder of major social, cultural, political, and economic changes in modern society. Of course, we can find many, many examples of technologies associated with enormous social changes. The automobile, for example, is a lot spoke of as causing a whole array of social changes, from the creation of suburbia, to the development of the fast f ar industry, to the paving of farm land, to the imported oil vulnerabilities of the 1970s. The popular media is filled with quasi(prenominal) examples of new technologies that argon going to change everything, from computers to nanotechnologies to new medical devices. And we are often told that we must find ways to accommodate ourselves to these new devices and to the changes they go away cause, that we must strive to ride the wave of social flux produced by emerging technologies, or face the dire prospect of being leave behind.This l anguage and these arguments, whether in the general media or in scholarly analyses, are examples of various kinds of technological determinism, the notion that technology is the most powerful rend behind the modern world, that technology drives history (Smith, Marx, 1994). Those who support this idea often say to a greater extent technology may well be thrust us in directions we do not want to go, that technology has someways gotten out of interpret. Technological determinism comes in different forms. For some, such as the young French scholar Jacques Ellul (1965, 1980, 1990), technology is the most powerful force in modern life, moving according to its own logic, and well beyond the control of humans. Others, such as political theorist Langdon Winner (1977, 1986), assert that tech... ...equired to offer and operate technological systems, such as electrical power grids, across the country telephone systems, television networks, etc. While the people involved in technological systems do abide the power to make choices -- as the anti-determinists claim -- they must make those choices in settings that can impose significant limits on the range of choices available, as the determinists claim. In other words, the control of technology becomes more difficult, and maybe ultimately impossible, as we move from smaller and simpler structures and artifacts toward much larger, complex, and mutually beneficial systems. It is much more difficult to change our minds about technologies after they have developed such organizational shells as multinational corporations or usual utilities, and after so much investment has occurred (Collingridge, 1980, Morone, Woodhouse, 1986).