Bread and Circuses

Is technology neutral, or does it carry meaning?  A pencil, a pen, a printing press, a hammer, or a saw, are items that are not filled with meaning in themselves.  A tool is something that does something useful or helpful in some way. The meaning of a tool is specific to that item.  What is done with the tool changes the meaning of the tool, of the device. Technology has changed everything we do in that it has created ways to communicate differently.   The user has the power to change the meaning of the device.

Technology is not just the tool, however.  It is now driving the way communication happens.  It is driving business, it has changed how we communicate ideas to one another, it has created immediacy of interaction that has never before been available to humanity.  Technology becomes meaningful as soon as the tool or device is used to create a message.    

Is the medium of technology purely informative, or is it there to create a message?  Can it create a message without interaction with the user?  I think of propaganda being created with the tools of printing presses and exhibited in the technological tool the newspaper, such as what happened in Germany prior to the beginning of the second world war.  I think of communicating across space and time.  Would we have known as much about what is happening in Egypt if people had not had access to cell phones?  Is the use of all the toys, or devices we now acquire merely a modern version of bread and circuses?  What does it mean to pacify an entire generation of users into having access to instant information, to vicarious entertainment, to not having to wait to obtain any gratification?  The meaning of each use, each transaction, is richer than it appears at the surface level.  There is depth and meaning to the use of technology.

 

Does not having access to technology change what we know?  Does it create a socioeconomic gap?  Does it contribute to reduced learning for certain students who don't have the actual tools in their hands?  The gap has the potential to get bigger as we load more learning, more transactions, onto technological devices.  What happens when the user has to bear the cost of technological change?  Until recently, much of the Internet was freely available, without commercial or economic constraints, but that is changing.   The recent debate in which the government tried to override the decision made by the CRTC, technically an arms-length decision-making body, illustrates the fact that technology is no longer the wild west of the past.

The user should be able to think freely about how and what they are doing with the technology they use.  But being engaged in the use of technology requires decisions on the part of the user -- cost of the tools, cost of using those tools, validity of the information that is sent out and received, verification of the source of the information, decisions made on the basis of information received, and ultimately, how the technology drives the user from one stage of knowledge to another.