reflections on technological determinism

When thinking about technological determinism, we have to take care that the rebuttal is not as naive as the idea itself. When questioning technological determinism, which is commonly understood as a view that sees technology as a prime causal force behind social change, we should first ask ourselves what we mean by 1) technology and 2) causality. Of course if we are being vague enough about the terms we are using, we can prove that anything is true. Any attempt at rebuttal can be countered with a perpetual alibi: the concepts are never at the scene of the crime, but just because they are perpetually shifting, they are always somewhere else, when in fact they are nowhere.

1) By technology we should not understand mere artefacts (cogs, wheels, microcircuits, software ...). The Greek word techne, from which the word technology derives, meant a sort of practical knowledge, a knowledge connected to poiesis (the act of producing artefacts generally and poetry specifically - the production of artistic texts). By technology I understand a) the knowledge a society possesses about manipulating the environment and themselves (primarily manifested in the scientific subsystem of society), b) the social organization of labour geared towards this sort of manipulation and finally c) artefacts used in this process.

2) In today's common sense scientific use (a syntagm that should be an oxymoron but sadly is not) causality is understood as covariation of two or more variables with temporal and logical precedence of the independent variable. Science should be more precise in defining causality. In philosophy from the time of Aristotle onward causality was not understood as a monolithic concept. According to Heidegger (1962), there are four types of causality:
a) causa materialis (the material that an object is made of)
b) causa formalis (the form, or mould, that the material is put into)
c) causa finalis (the purpose the object is to be put to)
d) causa efficiens (the force that actually produces the object)
If we apply these forms of causality to social phenomena, we could say that causa materialis is the state of that phenomena before some change is introduced, causa formalis is the broader social context that the change takes place in, causa finalis is the meaning conveyed to the phenomenon by actors involved and causa efficiens is the stimulus that triggers the change.

From these distinctions it is clear that the main way technology can have an effect on other spheres of society is by being a causa efficiens, a stimulus. Now a stimulus is always something external to the phenomenon. Or to be more precise, I will use a distinction from systems theory: between irritation and determination. We can speak of determination where internal states of systems are unequivocally determined by some factor (for example when the membrane of a neuron becomes depolarized beyond a certain threshold, the neuron will fire). We can speak of irritation when the input does not unequivocally determine the internal states of a system (a certain temperature - a stimulus - will produce different sensations in the body, depending on other factors). From this perspective technological change is an irritation to other spheres of society and can - depending on other circumstances - be the cause (causa efficiens) of profound changes. But it can not produce changes that the system itself was not programmed for.

Another thing that should be noted is that all the different aspects of technology I defined in point 1 (knowledge, social organization, artefacts) form an interrelated system. Changes in any part of this system are likely to be connected to changes in other parts. When looking at technology as just artefacts it is easy to confuse the changing of the whole system with a process where artefacts (the most noticeable part of the system) are causing the whole transformation. If we take the industrial "revolution" as an example: from as early as the 14. century transformations in the organization of labour have been taking place with the start of the accumulation of capital. Likewise the organization of knowledge has started changing profoundly with the renaissance. Both processes started to accelerate by the end of the 17. and beginning of the 18. century. When the steam engine was introduced in English factories these processes have already produced the manufacture, the organizational form of the modern factory. The steam engine itself was but the tip if the iceberg, it marked the culmination of a process that had been going on for at least 4 centuries. Of course the naive observer saw the abrupt changes that coincided with the invention of the steam engine.

References
Heidegger, Martin (1962): Die Technik und die Kehre. Pfullingen: Günther Neske.