Challenging the Phenomena of Technology

M. Hayler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137377869
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

What is 'technology'? What does it help us to do? What does it force us to consider about our experience of being in the world?In Challenging the Phenomena of Technology, technology is positioned as an experience with specific features, rather than as a class of objects, and this enables a reflection on the ways in which amateurs and experts interact with the artefacts that all humans rely upon. Using e-readers, such as the Kindle and iPad, as a case study, Hayler argues that the use of technology is both more complicated and more human than public discussion often gives it credit for, forcing us to consider its impacts on perception, cognition, and what it means to know anything at all.

1

Fighting the Tools of Our Nature: Technology in the Popular Imagination

In this chapter we will look at some of the distinctive attitudes people take towards new technologies and how such feelings often cut sharply against the grain of how technology is actually deployed in human life. One of the significant questions of this book is “how do we define ‘technology’?”, and in the second chapter I’ll consider the key scholarly attempts to establish the term, but I can’t begin to wrangle with those ideas before acknowledging the more emotive side of the argument. In our received notions of what technology is, there is a strong discourse of resisting new devices and defining technology by what it is not, principally by saying that it is not “natural.” As we’ll see, such ideas can manifest in strange ways – technology is a human thing, that’s what makes it unnatural, and yet it is rarely seen as a part of our nature, at least until a new technology comes along to replace something successful in an existing field, in which case the older (and preferred) technology often tends to be positioned as now being the more natural, or more attuned to our being. Discussions of the new devices for e-reading will provide us with useful demonstrations of just these kinds of conflict, pointing us to the most vital issues for users involved in the early moments of accommodating new daily practices. But the same argumentative shape also repeats in a variety of cultural arenas, a sample of which will be explored below. I offer this diversity of descriptions of resistance not on the assumption that the plural of “anecdote” is, eventually, “evidence,” but rather to jog the reader’s memory: I assume that these kinds of argument are familiar, from the media, from family and friends, from books read and films watched, conversations overheard and participated in – I simply want to demonstrate their pervasiveness and reiterate some of their more distinctive manifestations: technology in general isn’t natural; new technologies aren’t natural; technology makes us stupid; technology keeps us apart from the world. There are also two loose but important shapes to be found in these negative definitions: technology is unnatural, it separates us from the world, and technology corrupts, it does something to our minds.

I’ll argue later that these discourses are, at least partially, the result of an insufficient definition of “technology.” But, as is easily seen in the arguments around e-reading, there are always legitimate concerns with the introduction of new, often more complicated devices – we always lose something. It is part of the task of this book to work through how people adapt to the new despite its challenges, but the counter-argument to the blunter resistant discourses that we’ll encounter in this first chapter is simple: technology is natural in as much as it is a part of human nature. Much of the rest of the argument presented here rests on this fundamental fact, and as such it needs to be demonstrated ahead of time. But by presenting it in the face of what I expect to be very familiar arguments to the contrary, I hope to show that we can nuance the debate around technology whilst retaining the important concerns of those who might justifiably resist new equipment in any area.

By using that word, “resistance,” I fully intend to invoke a political, moral, or ethical claim to avoiding or repudiating the move toward new technologies or new norms of use and, in the particular case of e-reading, to allowing a generation to grow up reading from screens rather than paper pages. Such stances range throughout the popular discourses surrounding the resistance to digital reading devices, from the essayist Sven Birkerts’ assertion in The Gutenberg Elegies that “language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle” (6), to David Gelernter’s solution for digital technology being useful, but codex reading being somehow “right”: “I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa” (“The Book Made Better,” my emphasis).¹ Ideas of rightness, essence, of what is correct are at the heart of much contemporary discussion of reading, and Birkerts is amongst the most eloquent detractors, picking up on this language of the unnatural throughout his work. His playing up of a dichotomy between the reader’s “natural” interaction with a bound book and the “unnatural” processes of reading on a multimedia screen recurs frequently throughout the Elegies: “Running the eyes down column-inches of print is part of the former way of processing the world, but it is no longer the natural mode for many. Not when bits of information stream in from every source, there to be isolated and studied as needed” (238). It is clear from Birkerts’ phrasing here that this new mode may have become the default, but to him it seems far from natural. This way of thinking reaches its apotheosis in his claim that: “[w]hat [codex] reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it” (85).² This final quotation gets us to the crux of the resistance to “unnatural” new reading practices: for those set most firmly against digital reading technology, codex reading, and all of its related practices, has become an almost religious or spiritual experience, tapping into something at our core. Fully bearing this out, the novelist Alan Kaufman, in a ferocious article entitled “The Electronic Book Burning,” says of his hatred of digitisation:

My books have been hard-won. What made it all seem worthwhile was the book, the physical item, a kind of sacred and appropriate temple for the text contained within. Had I been told from youth that my literary destination would be some 7 inch plastic gizmo containing my texts shuffling alongside thousands of other “texts” I would have spit in the face of such a profession and become instead a hit man or a rabbi ... To me, the book is one of life’s most sacred objects, a torah, a testament, something not only worth living for but as shown in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, something that is even worth dying for ... I have given the days of my life, my years, my youth and adulthood to the book, as both sacred object and text.

Not all commentators would go this far, of course, and I suspect that many of those who imply or deploy that word “unnatural” would deride the full extent of Birkerts and Kaufman’s polemic. But it does feel as if each instance stems from a common pool, and part of the function of this chapter will be to investigate why the rhetoric of the unnatural is so pervasive in expressions of the mundane experience of new technologies as sources of frustration and concern.

1.1 Technology is unnatural

The history of resistance to what we might instinctively call “technology” is most often associated with the start of the industrial revolution and the Luddite movement that saw outbreaks of violent dissent targeting the new machines of agriculture and production, and occasionally their owners, in the wake of widespread unemployment³. The historian Richard Bulliet, however, traces an even earlier history to the medieval Middle East in “Determinism and Pre-Industrial Technology.” Bulliet questions the notion of inevitable and linear progression in technological development, his research demonstrating that communities resisted adopting certain efficient new technologies such as alternative yoking mechanisms for draft animals, the use of wheeled transport and wheelbarrows, and even early forms of print, all of which were deployed by other geographically proximal cultures. The reasons he cites for such refusal include class-based resistance, but also ethnic and lifestyle factors, attitudes of “us and them” with relation to surrounding cultures which prevented the adoption of outwardly superior new tools. It is easy to see how such moralism might manifest as resistance: “they use x, we’re superior to them and we use y, therefore y is correct/right/natural” (a more persuasive discourse, perhaps, than “I’d rather suffer than be like them,” and one with a ring of Nietzschean truth with regards to the origin of certain kinds of morality).

The reasons to resist technology, then, are numerous and have become deeply rooted around the world, significantly predating the proliferation of complex artefacts which seem to mark out various contemporary cultures as being somehow more technologically minded (more on this later). From the Enlightenment onwards, however, romanticised (and Romantic) resistances appealing to a return to natural living become increasingly widespread in direct proportion to the perceived impact of technology on the average citizen’s daily life. The Romanticism scholar Steven E. Jones identifies a movement, “Neo-Luddism” (Against Technology 20), which draws upon the historical Luddite cause, if in bastardised fashion, as a source of utopic reasoning with regard to technology. Neo-Luddism can be taken to encompass viewpoints as diverse as a continuation of the original Luddite fear of displacing human labour with mechanical apparatus, to a full blown “technophobia,” a more general fear of the negative potential inherent in increasingly complex, intrusive, or embedded technologies. But Jones notes a significant tension between modern Neo-Luddite resistance to (primarily digital) technologies and the original Luddite cause:

Today “Luddite” often means “deluded technophobe” ... [D]etermined weavers and cloth finishers, skilled artisans demanding fair wages and control over their own trade, [are] often wrongly interpreted as champions of the simple life and of nature, as voluntary primitives and Romantics ... [But it was the Luddites’] right to their technology [that] they fought to protect, not some Romantic idyll in an imagined pretechnological nature. (3 & 9)

Rarely is the popular invocation of Luddism about a fight for workers’ rights, instead appealing to an idyllic pretechnological state from which modern society seems to exponentially propel us. I am certainly not suggesting that contemporary fears are unfounded, indeed the crises of anthropogenic climate change, oil spills, extreme water shortages, grain speculations, crop monocultures, and antibiotic resistant superbugs are continual reminders that questioning the unrelenting pursuit of a nebulous “progress” is essential to any hope of a responsible consumer society. Jones, however, also describes a problem with uniform resistance: “There are undoubtedly real technology-based conspiracies or patterns of connectedness at work behind the scenes and a general suspicion in this regard is not paranoid in the clinical sense: It is prudent citizenship ... [T]he nature of [a] paranoid response is a tendency to universalize its fears” (176). The homogenisation of resistant discourses around a natural vs. unnatural binary exemplifies such universalised fears and demonstrates that the questioning of technological change may also prove detrimental if left unquestioned itself. Screen reading, for instance, might mark a potential ecological improvement over the current printed book industry;⁴ may allow for greater and more democratic access to cultural works from all literate cultures;⁵ might encourage a generation used to television and computers not to abandon reading;⁶ and may even simply be a convenient way to access written material. If the resistance to it is just a slavish adherence to an older trend of cynicism in the face of the new, then, no matter how useful or practical or vital that trend, it deserves to be interrogated, not least because it has much to tell us about both our attitudes towards new artefacts and our misunderstanding of how we actually deploy material culture.

1.1.1 Satirising scares

The resistance to modern technology, particularly scare stories surrounding the effects of digitisation, have become so widespread that they have begun to be analysed and lampooned in light of their historical counterparts.⁷ Kathrin Passig, for instance, identifies some “Commonplaces of Technological Critique,” arguments which have been put forth recurrently over the last century as generic criticisms of new equipment including:

•“What the hell is it good for?” – A phrase IBM engineer Robert Lloyd asked of the microprocessor in 1968.

•“Who wants it anyway?” – Harry M. Warner, one quarter of the Warner Brothers studio’s founding family team, is said to have asked in 1927 “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

•It’s destroying our minds: – “People read ... what is true and what is false mingled together, without examination, and they do this purely out of curiosity, with no real thirst for knowledge ... Idleness becomes a habit and creates, as does all idleness, a relaxation of the soul’s energy,” this a warning from the Universal Lexicon of Upbringing and Teaching in 1844.

•If the new technology has to do with thinking, writing, or reading, then it will most certainly change our techniques of thinking, writing, or reading for the worse – “For critics around 1870, the postcard sounded the death knell for the culture of letter writing, while in February 1897 the American Newspaper Publishers Association discussed whether ‘typewriters lower the literary grade of work done by reporters.’”

And Randall Munroe, writer of the popular webcomic XKCD, compiled a similarly revealing list of common queries about new devices:

“Simple Answers”

What’s significant about these instances, what makes them funny, is their painful familiarity. Such ideas recur again and again in discussions of new technology, implying both a general fear of change, but also a common source or set of common sources. A history of railing against new technologies, and often in predictable fashion, contextualises current debates about e-reading, exemplifies Jones’ universalisation of fears, and raises two important points: (i) that people frequently consider a move away from the equipment that they are used to using as being at the very least problematic, and at worst an outright threat, and (ii) when technologies have been around for a while they can start to seem to be a part of the natural order – “it’s not these older technologies we have to worry about, it’s those new ones that pose a threat, that separate us from the world.”

1.1.2 Separation from nature

Nature is often seen as the privileged term in a dyad with culture, artifice, or the human, but this certainly hasn’t always been the case, particularly in the West: “[m]uch of the extravagant hope generated by the Enlightenment project derived from a trust in the virtually limitless expansion of new knowledge of – and thus enhanced power over – nature” (Marx, “Postmodern Pessimism” 239). It is a resistance to this very project of dominion which shapes much Neo-Luddite critique, seen at an extreme in the extension of Rousseau’s “noble savage” (the most typically Romantic of resistances) to the anti-technology, anti-civilisation “anarcho-primitivism” touted by the philosopher and self-professed Neo-Luddite John Zerzan⁸ and his sympathies with the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber⁹. More moderate resistant voices do, of course, exist; the philosopher John Gray’s masterful Straw Dogs, for example, questions the modern faith in the progress of technology as a replacement for religious belief, and earlier, in the American Romanticism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Fighting the Tools of Our Nature: Technology in the Popular Imagination
• 2  Beyond Common Sense: Technology by Definition
• 3  All Is One but Not for All: Technology as an Object Encountered in the World
• 4  Brushing Against Reality: Technological Interactions Require Knowledge
• 5  What Everything Knows: Technologies as an Embodiment of Knowledge
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index