What stance should we take toward a technology?

1
What stance should we take toward a technology?

• Neutral
• Oppositional
• Utilitarian
• Skeptical
• Transformational

2
System vs. technology

• System dominates (Cuban, Cohen, Weizenbaum,
  Winner, etc.)
• Technology dominates
• Negative Ellul, Heidegger
• Positive Roblyer, Rheingold, NSF, etc.

3
Transformations

• primitive symbol systems
• gt orality
• gt early writing
• gt manuscript literacy
• gt print literacy
• gt video literacy
• gt digital/multimedia

4
Transformations in a Post-Typographic World

• Understanding how literacy may be affected by a
  shift from printed to digital forms is more than
  an academic exercise. The cumulative force of the
  perspectives here advances a convincing
  argument that the transformations of literacy
  that are beginning to become evident are major
  threads running through the fabric of daily
  life.The effects of transformations brought about
  by a move from a literacy based on printed pages
  to one based on digital displays on computer
  screens are likely to be felt across the
  sociocultural spectrum in areas such as medicine,
  law, government and international relations,
  economics, and communication. Reinking,
  et al 1998

5
The Technology Dream

• Hardware
• Software
• Physical facilities
• Documentation
• Manual
• Teachers guide

• Training
• Support system
• Categories of users
• Situations of use

6
What is the relation of the technology to the
context of use?
7
Uni-contextual

• Alpha testing
• Assumption of uniformity
• Technocentric

8
Multi-contextual

• Treatment x setting interactions
• Diversity of contexts
• Appropriate, proper, faithful uses
• gt What are the outcomes of using the
  technology?

9
Future

• global community, groupminds, the
  all-encompassing text, net-think, empowerment for
  all?
• surveillance, regimentation, stratification, the
  ultimate totalization, the end of humanity?

10
Inter-contextual

• Artifact -gt actor network (Latour, Callon)
• Cyborg (Haraway)
• Information ecology (Nardi ODay)
• Activity systems (Vygotsky, Cole)
• gt How is the technology integrated into a
  system of practices?

11
Trans-contextual

• Tool for inquiry (Dewey/Hickman)
• Cultural formation (Williams Selfes Balsamo
  Reeves Nass)
• gt How is the technology read?

12
Abramss total situation
13
Reading technology
14
Approaches to critical theory
15
Destabilizing Abramss triangle

• the enfranchisement of the viewers perspective
  is precisely the feature which introduces the
  subversive possibility that each term in the
  total situation is radically unstable or
  indeterminate, a product of the beholders gaze
• Freund, The Return of the Reader, 1987, p. 2

16
Destabilizing the art triangle
17
Destabilizing technology