Technics

Losing my computer first thing Monday morning with so much to do - so much taken for granted, so much reliance.

Ivan Illich worries about unintended consequences of tools; a good tool is convivial, and convivial if:

1. it can be freely chosen

2. an active expression of a personal life

3. is not monopolised by a professional elite.

Whereas tools are the product of the bricolage process, machines are not. The word ‘machine’ derives from the Greek mékhané meaning ‘skill, cunning invention’. Engineer derives from genius from ingenium, ‘innate tendencies, natural qualities’ an ‘engine’ is the result of such talent. From the 11th century, the one who built the engines, usually for war, was the ingeniator - engineer. Tim Ingold notes that the artisan has been replaced by machine operator which together with the idea of technology encourages a false distinction between conception and execution. As a result, we separate the creative part (planning / design) from the implementation (seen as mechanical), and think that in the past when tools were used there must have been a technology, i.e. that every tool came with instructions for the user without any attention paid to context or to experience.

The term technology was introduced in the 17th C when scientists were beginning to revolutionise the world view from the organic to mechanical, and the notion that that through rational understanding the machine could be harnessed.Technology is usually defined in terms of tools, as efficient means to an end, or as an ensemble of material artifacts. But technology takes in the making of machines and the conditions, processes to make them, a social and material universe of materials, skills, techniques, social forms and forces, including capitalism. I am not a technological determinist, realising the contingent and social constructivist nature of social processes that establish definitions and roles of technologies but agree with Andrew Feenberg that technologies are not neutral, but tend to work for the capitalist goals of power and profit.

Technology may be viewed from an instrumentalist position, i.e. that technologies are single tools that lie ready to hand as in a toolbox, and that tools are neutral or value-free means to chosen ends. This is far too simplistic. Tools are substantive, they change how we work with the world and how we think about it, but they are embodied, however, technology is a rupture from a tactile industrial world to virtual, as Paul Virilio has argued. Don Ihde uses the term ‘Technics’ as “a symbiosis of artifact and user within a human action." Humans work the world in a “symbiotic and mediated” way, not simply an instrumental one. More recently, Ihde notes that technology is culturally embedded so that before we blame technology for the environmental crisis he suggests we should examine how we use it and the cultural practices which surround it. Albert Borgmann uses the term ‘device’ and thinks we are becoming prisoners of devices.

Devices are instrumental, but work hidden from consciousness. A computer is vastly complicated, but all you do is press a button to get it going. Other devices, like washing machines, or missile systems, you press a button and everything is taken care of.

“The computer is a vastly more potent tool than, say, a hammer. It is true that, if I take everything for a nail and let the hammer run riot in my hands, I have forsaken responsibility. But I am not likely to mistake a hammer for a thinking device. Computers are highly adaptive, universal machines, and when we bring to them a willingness to sacrifice our own functioning to that of our tools, we risk sacrificing, not just one particular capacity, but the entire field of human responsibility.” Stephen Talbott [i]

[i] Stephen L. Talbott, ‘COMPUTERIZED TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY Frequently Asked Questions,’http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/index.html