There's an interesting post on Moonbat Russ Francis's Media Moonbat blog about technological determinism. The Moonbats are not new to this phrase--which is, as Moonbat Jenna's sensei, Dan Hickey, explained, "just about the worst thing you can be called in media studies."
Calling someone a technological determinist suggests they're focusing on the wrong things: Instead of considering emergent social practices around new social tools, they only care about how cool Wikipedia is. They only want to know how to use MySpace in the classroom. They only want to find out how to use Twitter.
As Moonbat Francis points out, a "false dichotomy" exists around the notion of technological determinism. He cites a section of his dissertation, The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age, to show how post-Vygotskian theory helped him push past this dichotomy which he argues "has held back research in [media and education studies]." Here's the chunk of his dissertation:
Scholars interested in the relationship between cultural and media change invariably become embroiled in a debate that polarises into two camps: those accused of technological determinism, often linked with the work of McLuhan (1962; 1994); and advocates of the Social Shaping of Technology who emphasise that technologies are always invented and adapted by real people in particular socio-historical circumstances (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). Socio-cultural theory provides an alternative way to think about the implications of media change that stems from the centrality of the idea of the dialectic in post-Vygotskian thought. Wertsch (1998, pp. 23-72; 1995a, pp. 65-68) develops this line of thinking using an analogy that makes reference to the history of pole-vaulting following the invention of fibreglass poles that young athletes exploited to gain an advantage in a competitive Olympic sport.
The technique allows vaulters to exploit the elastic properties of glass fibre to slingshot themselves over the bar. Historically, it allowed vaulters to surpass the records set by Cornelius Warmerdam in 1957 who used a rigid bamboo pole. Interesting, Wertsch tells us that, while young athletes around the world started to appropriate the elastic properties of glass fibre poles, old timers, whose technique depended on the relative rigidity of bamboo poles claimed that the rules of the game had fundamentally changed. Indeed, some claimed it wasn’t the same sport and retired.
This provides a model for thinking about the changing culture of university learning in the new media age. Significantly, the invention of new mediational means (i.e. glass fibre poles) didn’t cause change. Change was driven from the bottom up by young vaulters as they exploited its affordances to gain an edge in a competitive Olympic sport. Similarly, access to digital tools and resources does not cause change in itself; rather change is driven from the bottom-up as advanced learners start to appropriate, experiment and innovate new strategies that depend on the affordances [of] the available cultural tool-kit.
Moonbat Katie once made an argument that (and I hope I'm getting this right) literacy itself had been reduced to a technology instead of a social practice. Indeed, isn't everything, at some point or another, reduced simply to a technology? As Clay Shirky writes, "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring."
Add to this my own position that focusing on a specific tool to figure out the interesting social practices that emerge around (or, if you prefer, surround and embrace) that tool is the exact opposite of technological determinism--so far away from it, in fact, that having a serious conversation about the notion of technological determinism gets difficult. Those of us over here thinking in similar ways to Wertsch and Moonbat Russ have a hard time figuring out what they're even doing that makes people think they're deterministic.
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