ICT as Political Action

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ICT – a faustian bargain?

Postman (1995) argues that while ICT may provide gains they also involve losses.  Like Oppenheimer he draws on the recent history of technology implementation to support this view.  He claims that in the past, when technology has had positive effects, it has also carried with it disadvantages.  Often the disadvantages outweigh the advantages:
After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.
(Postman 1990: 2)
Am I using this technology, or is it using me?" Charlene Hunter Gault interviews media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman on PBS' The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in 1995.  

Postman’s ‘Faustian bargain’ has resonances of McLuhan’s ‘extensions’ and ‘amputations’ (2001).  McLuhan argued that all technologies are ‘extensions’ of the body; for example the car is an ‘extension’ of our feet.  But while we seek the car for the ‘extension’ we also receive an ‘amputation’ in the sense that the ability of our legs to walk diminishes.  Postman sees cultures as classed into three types: tool-making, technocracies and technopolies.

In tool-making societies tools are used to solve immediate and urgent problems of physical life or to serve the symbolic world of art, politics or religion. In Postman’s view, making a spear to hunt or a watermill for power represent the former while building a cathedral or a castle represent the latter. These tools, he says, did not attack the dignity or integrity of the culture they were brought into; they contributed to it.  In a technocratic culture, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. So everything in the culture is subject to and must give way to their development.  The technocratic tools attack the culture in an attempt to become the culture. 

In a technocracy the technocratic culture co-exists with the tool-making culture.  However, in a technopoly the tool making culture has lost the battle, and the meanings of tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion are defined by the new ‘totalitarian technopoly’.  As a result of this analysis Postman comes to several conclusions, among them that computers have no place in classrooms.  The basis for this argument is that in a traditional classroom there is balance between individualised learning, competition, and personal autonomy on the one hand and group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility on the other (Postman 1995: 17).  According to Postman, computers in the classroom threaten that balance and ensure that private learning and individual problem solving will dominate to the detriment of communal speech.  This could be seen as the Faustian bargain.  Private learning gains while communal speech suffers. 

While Postman has provided a carefully argued position, Kaplan (1995: 34) has drawn attention to the fact that Tuman, another critic of ‘electronic writing technologies’, makes his criticism of computers in the classroom on precisely opposite grounds: claiming that they ‘shift the primary focus of literacy away from the self-contained text and toward a new kind of interactive discourse akin to conversation...’ (Tuman 1992: 90).  It appears that Postman is opposed to computers because they eliminate communal speech while Tuman is opposed to computers because they promote interactive discourse.  If technologies have inherent logics Kaplan questions how the underlying logic of computing could lead to two such radically different causes for the loss of print literacies.  It appears that Postman and Tuman are making their case based not on the inherent logics of computing but on particular uses that computers have been put to.  It would not be unreasonable to infer that Postman’s and Tuman’s work and Kaplan’s analysis suggest that we need to look not at technological determinism but at human agency as a means of envisioning a desirable future and inventing ways of bringing it about (Schön 1991: 16).

   
   
   
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