Landon Winner’s 1980 article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” introduces his claim that technologies have a way of defining the way we build the world and that “some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way” (33). In other words, the adoption of a technical system changes the way we act and interact, in a social context and in a political context. He argues that we should pay more close attention to the nature of technologies and the anticipated consequences of adopting certain technologies.
Over the course of the semester, we have looked at new media, not just what it does, but also the affect it has on the way we think, the way we communicate, and the way we learn. It is not merely a tool, but it has the potential to change the way we interact culturally and politically.
In his book, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, Shane Hipps paraphrases Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media, stating, “Every medium is an extension of our humanity” (34).
He continues, “All forms of media (i.e., any human inventio or technology) extend or amplify some part of ourselves. They either extend a part of our body, one or more of the senses, some function of our mental processes, or some social process” (34) and offered some examples: The wheel extends our body and “amplifies the function of the foot,” the telephone extends our voice and our ear, eyeglasses extend our ability to see, and weapons extend our teeth and our fists.
He allows that this is a very broad and unusual definition that includes items we don’t usually define as media, but states, “Understanding media as extensions of ourselves is crucial to understanding media, period. When we fail to see media this way, we become overly enamored, giving them the power to make us slaves to our own creations” (35).
I like McLuhan’s definition, and I appreciate Hipps’ application of the definition. Both allow me to view writing, communication, and other forms of new media through new lenses and challenge me to think about the implications of using these extensions to my body and my mind.
His definitions challenge previous ways of thinking. For example, the use of words and the communication of ideas through ideas are so essential to my way of life that I don’t see these things as technology. They have become a part of me. In fact, I am often more comfortable writing than I am with entering into random conversations. I can plan what to say in an essay or a blog; I can be in control. If I am not writing, I am often reading, absorbed in the power of text.
Hipps might argue that I have become a slave to the written word.
Hipps’ use of McLuhan’s definitions is not limited to the power of text. He is arguing that we need to examine that ways that media, particularly communications media, directly or indirectly affects communication. What are the implications of adopting any given medium?
These ideas complement Winner’s argument about the politics of technology and his warning that we must pay attention to the unintended consequences of technology.
Both of these writers have challenged me this semester, and pushed me to examine the world in new ways and to explore the nature of technologies in my life, in our culture, and in the world. They have forced me to redefine terms like “media,” “writing,” technology,” and “politics.”
And that really is Postman’s point in “The Word Weavers/The World Makers.” Every day, wherever we go, we are subject to ideas, communicated in words that affect the way we think in subtle ways. We don’t think about the verbs we use, the prepositions, or the metaphors that define our world. We adopt verbal expressions as tools to communicate, but we don’t realize how they affect the way we think. (This makes me wonder if McLuhan would categorize words, an extension of thought, as media.)
Postman claims, “Definitions, questions, metaphors—these are three of the most potent elements with which human language constructs a worldview” (135). Words have power; they are artifacts with politics, intended and unintended.
Just as we don’t generally talk about the use of computers for the acquisition of information as having political implications, we don’t talk generally about the use of words to shape the world, we don’t generally teach students to identify or question the use of metaphors through which they see the world.
And because they don’t learn to identify or question the shaping of their world through language, “world making through language is a narrative of power, durability, and inspiration” (135).
Winner describes this as politics.
Hipps claims that if we don’t examine the effects of media, we become slaves to it. We must study and understand cultural forces in order to “learn to use them rather than be used by them” (183).
He argues for technology education, which isn’t training on how to use technology, but the study of
. . . how televisions and movie cameras, Xerox machines, and computers reorder our psychic habits, our social relations, our political ideas, and our moral sensibilities. It is about how the meanings of information and education change as new technologies intrude upon a culture, how the meanings of truth, law, and intelligence differ among oral cultures, writing cultures, printing cultures, electronic cultures. (143)
He includes ten principles that should be included in such an education, including the understanding that all “technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage” (143), and that these advantages “are never distributed evenly among the population . . . new technology benefits some and harms others” (143).
Winner, Hipps, and Postman are not arguing for the abandonment of technology. They just want us to think about what is happening, about the ways our world is shaped for us instead of by us. Hipps quotes McLuhan, who said, “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening,” (182) and suggests that “by understanding the forces that shape us, no outcome is inevitable” (183).
