85502 Chap.9 Technology, Determinism and Design
Technology, Determinism and Design
Is technology a force?
Week 9 asks whether technology is autonomous, a force that determines society, as naming historical periods after their machines can suggest.
Design as mediator
The lecture places design between the technical systems that make things and the habits of the people who use them, extending the Week 2 story of deskilling and Luddism.
Key ideas
Technological determinism, social shaping, transhumanism and human-technology relations are set against each other, and the tutorial turns to presentation skills for Assessment 2.
Why the debate matters
MacKenzie and Wajcman argue that believing technology simply happens to us breeds passivity: we learn to adapt rather than to shape.
For designers, who make the choices that technologies embody, that argument is a reason to keep asking who decided and why.
What this chapter covers
- 01
What counts as technology
- 02
Technological determinism and its partial truth
- 03
The social shaping of technology
- 04
Do artefacts have politics?
- 05
Transhumanism
- 06
Design as mediator between production and consumption
- 07
Presentation skills
- 08
Reading stock technology imagery
Worked example · free
Rewrite a determinist sentence as social shaping
- 1Identify the problem: the device is the only actor, the view MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999) call technological determinism.
- 1Add the human choices: companies designed features to hold attention, and users adopted and adapted them.
- 1Rewrite: design decisions by technology firms, taken up and reshaped by young users, changed how they socialise.
- 1Explain the gain: the new sentence opens the question of who shaped the change and who could shape it differently.
Key terms
- Technological determinism
- The view that technology develops by its own logic and then shapes society.
- Social shaping of technology
- The view that social, economic and political choices shape what technologies become.
- Transhumanism
- The idea that technology can carry humans beyond their biological limits.
Technology, Determinism and Design FAQ
What is technological determinism?
It is the common view that technologies change because of scientific advance or their own logic and then have effects on society. MacKenzie and Wajcman say it contains a partial truth, since technology matters to how we live together, but is mistaken as a theory of technology because it treats technical change as arriving from outside society.
What does Winner mean by artefacts having politics?
Winner argues that technologies can be designed, consciously or not, to open some social options and close others; MacKenzie and Wajcman summarise his example of road systems built to ease some people’s travel and hinder others’. He also argues that some technologies are political in their entirety.
How does Week 9 connect to Week 2?
The lecture extends the Week 2 labour themes, technological deskilling and Luddism, into the history and philosophy of technology. Reading the Luddites through social shaping rather than determinism turns them from people resisting the inevitable into participants in a contest over how machines would be used.
What readings are set for Week 9?
Two are set to read or watch: Slack and Wise’s chapter titled Determinism from Culture and technology, and a 2022 Philosophy Tube video on transhumanism. Further recommended readings are MacKenzie and Wajcman’s introductory essay on the social shaping of technology, available as an online excerpt, and Langdon Winner’s 1980 article Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Why does the lecture analyse a stock image of technology?
Because ordinary imagery carries ideas. The page notes that a search for technology returns blue pictures of white hands and glowing lines, and that this look has barely changed in years of teaching the topic. Asking what values such images communicate, and whether nearby headlines sound determinist, is a quick exercise in semiotic analysis.
What is the Week 9 tutorial skill?
Presentation skills. The tutorial treats how you communicate as being as important as what you say, and points to UTS HELPS resources on preparing presentations. It prepares you for the Assessment 2 talk, which runs five to seven minutes and is assessed for structure, flow and engagement.
Assessment move
Collect three news headlines about technology and label each as determinist or social shaping, then rewrite one. Read the MacKenzie and Wajcman excerpt for its argument about passivity, since it gives you a ready-made critical move for any technology artefact. Use the tutorial to rehearse your Assessment 2 opening minute, and time it.
Finally, take one artefact you are considering for Assessment 2 and write two sentences about it, one in a determinist voice and one in a social-shaping voice, then keep the second.
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