Many people talk about "technology" as if this word needed no definition or explanation. They imagine there is a clear boundary between "technology" and other stuff, and they perhaps also imagine that all technology-literate people have a common view as to where this boundary sits.
For example, I have recently been following a debate between Andrew McAfee (originator of the term "Enterprise 2.0") and several other bloggers, including Tom Graves and Oscar Berg. They complain that McAfee's definition of the term focuses on the software devices rather than on the emerging working practices (possibly supported by these software devices).
Both McAfee and his critics appear to use the word "technology" to refer to the software devices independently of their use. McAfee refers to something he wrote a couple of years back entitled It’s Not Not About the Technology, in which he criticizes two different versions of the statement "It's not about the technology". He argues that it is dangerous to ignore the details of a given piece of technology, and I presume he is referring to the software device. Berg complains that McAfee's definition is technology-centric, and McAfee's response is that his definition refers to people AND technology, from which I infer that he accepts a notion of "technology" that doesn't include people-using-technology.
This is an extremely common view of technology, but it is also highly problematic, as social critics of technology have long argued. Lewis Mumford preferred to talk about Technics, and Albert Borgmann has produced an extremely well-argued analysis of what he calls the Device Paradigm.
In my own work on technology adoption, I have always placed equal emphasis on assimilation (tuning the devices to fit the organization) and accommodation (tuning the organization to fit the devices). (The concepts of assimilation and accommodation come from Piaget via Leonard-Barton.) I don't find it helpful to think of software existing in some purely abstract shrink-wrapped world independently of being used, and I draw a more nuanced notion of technology and its development from sociologists such as Latour and Bijker.
In his latest post A comment to McAfee's "A Defining Moment", Oscar cites some statistics on social media and asks "How much would you attribute to technology for this development, and how much to human attitudes and behavior?"
But this question only makes sense on the assumption that we can cleanly separate "technology" from "human attitudes and behaviour", and I challenge this assumption. Graham Hill quotes an extreme example of how technology is inextricably intertwined with human attitudes and behaviour. "The mobile phone is the most personal of devices. It's like entering the customers bedroom. So brands need to be very sexy!" In other words, the mobile phone is not just a "piece of technology", it is a socially constructed artefact, what Latour calls a "black box".
By the way, I don't agree with everything written by Bijker, Borgmann, Latour and Mumford, and I don't expect you to either. But I wish more people had read them, and I wish more people were prepared to think a bit more deeply about the nature of technology.
Here's another example. In New Swimming World Records: Technology or Training?, Carlos Gershenson classified fancy swimsuits as "technology" but better techniques and understanding of fluid dynamics as "training", points out that different policies (regulations) apply to the two categories, and (rightly) asks where to draw the boundary?
Showing posts with label languaging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label languaging. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Crude Categories
@snowded is wondering when people will give up on crude categories like Gen X/Y? @gbrettmiller adds that it's the ever present problem of "us" and "them"; unfortunately many people think in terms of these categories or, worse, labels.
I suspect Dave already knows the answer. This could be a rhetorical question, expressing frustration and despair with the fact that people find these crude categories so attractive. Surely he cannot be hoping for some collective epiphany, in which people throw all such crude distinctions onto a Bonfire of the Categories?
Implicit in Dave's question is a distinction between "crude" categories and some other kind of categories, perhaps "refined". Perhaps crude categories are those we use without deliberation or reflection. So what would "refining" or "refinement" look like?
Many of the categories Dave is referring to are polythetic ones - dependent on an overlapping set of characteristic features rather than a single defining feature. Therefore one of the characteristic features of the refined use of such categories is to remind ourselves that a simple category label stands for a complex set of overlapping attributes, not all of which may be present in any given situation. Any conclusions we might try and draw from these categories should be regarded as unreliable until they have been verified by unpacking the category into the complex observations of which it provides a simple summary.
Next practice doesn't mean discarding labels and categories, but it should probably mean being a little more self-aware about what Maturana calls "languaging" - including one's use of labels and the conclusions one draws from them.
Further reading:
I suspect Dave already knows the answer. This could be a rhetorical question, expressing frustration and despair with the fact that people find these crude categories so attractive. Surely he cannot be hoping for some collective epiphany, in which people throw all such crude distinctions onto a Bonfire of the Categories?
Implicit in Dave's question is a distinction between "crude" categories and some other kind of categories, perhaps "refined". Perhaps crude categories are those we use without deliberation or reflection. So what would "refining" or "refinement" look like?
Many of the categories Dave is referring to are polythetic ones - dependent on an overlapping set of characteristic features rather than a single defining feature. Therefore one of the characteristic features of the refined use of such categories is to remind ourselves that a simple category label stands for a complex set of overlapping attributes, not all of which may be present in any given situation. Any conclusions we might try and draw from these categories should be regarded as unreliable until they have been verified by unpacking the category into the complex observations of which it provides a simple summary.
Next practice doesn't mean discarding labels and categories, but it should probably mean being a little more self-aware about what Maturana calls "languaging" - including one's use of labels and the conclusions one draws from them.
Further reading:
- Vincent Kenny, Life, the Multiverse and Everything: An introduction to the ideas of Humberto Maturana (1985)
- Ernst von Glasersfeld, Distinguishing the Observer: An Attempt at Interpreting Maturana
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