A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to a small workshop at Queen's University with some other journalists. We met researchers there working on issues involving technology, surveillance, privacy and the interface between human and machine. It was a lot of fun.
Coming away from that seminar, though, I was reminded of a book I'd read a few years ago by Andrew Feenberg called Questioning Technology. Feenberg was then a philosophy professor at San Diego State University but I'm pleased to see that he's been lured up to the Great White North and holds a Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
At Queen's, we got into a discussion (ok, I kinda dragged everyone there into this topic) that touched on what I'll call the perceived neutrality of technology. When people say technology is neutral they're really making the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Scientists and techno-enthusiasts will often dress that argument up a bit, saying that tools, methodologies, inventions -- technology -- are valueless and that they acquire values -- good, evil, helpful, hurtful -- only from use. A knife is just a tool. But use it to cut your veggies, it becomes a good knife. Use it to kill, it is a bad knife.
I'm not so convinced of that view. I think technology, more often than not, has a value system built it into it. I think Feenberg thinks the same way too:

... the democratic movement [used to] g[i]ve is fullest confidence to the natural processes of technological development, and it was only conservative cultural critics who lamented the price of progress. The Ruskins and the Heideggers deplored the dehumanizing advance of the machine while democrats and socialists cheered on the engineers, heroic conquerors of nature. However, all agreed that technology was an autonomous force separate from society, a kind of second nature impinging on social life from the alien realm of reason in which science too find its source. For good or ill, technology's essence - rational control, efficiency -- ruled modern life.
But this conception of technology is incompatible with the extension of democracy to the technical sphere. Technology is the medium of daily life in modern societies. Every major change reverbates at many levels, economic, political, religious, cultural. Insofar as we continue to see the technical and the social as separate domains, important aspects of these dimensions of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society... [p. viii]

... insofar as democracy challenges the autonomy of technology, the "essentiast" philosophy of technology around which there used to be such general consensus, is challenged as well. ... [p viii]

...technologies are not merely efficient devices or efficiency oriented practices but include their contexts as these are embodied in design and social insertion. The contexts of technology include such things as its relation to vocations, to responsibility, initiative, and authority, to ethics and aesthetics, in sum, to the realm of meaning. [p xiii]

... the notion of the "neutrality" of technology is a standard defensive reaction on the part of professions and organizations confronted by public protest and attempting to protect their autonomy. But in reality technical professions are never autonomous; in defending their traditions, they actually defend the outcomes of earlier controversies rather than a supposedly pure technical rationality... [p 89]
You can read the preface to the book, from which I've quoted several chunks, here. If you like that, by the way, I'd also recommend We Have Never Been Modern by French philosopher Bruno Latour. Can't say I'm smart enough to understand everything Feenberg and Latour are talking about it, but their writing seems to start firing some critical thinking neurons in my brain and that, I suppose, is what good philosophy is supposed to do.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,