In his book, The
Shallows, author and blogger Nicholas Carr agrees that “technologies are
not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape
that activity and its meaning” (Carr 47), which was originally said by the
political scientist Langdon Winner. I disagree with this statement for a few
reasons. I don’t believe that they are technically “powerful” by themselves or
that they have their own minds and are forcing us to do anything. I really don’t
think that they have any power over us and that we control them and have all of
the power over them.
In my opinion, technologies are just devices constructed
from intelligent men and women that make themselves and also other users who
buy the product powerful, not the technology itself. The technologies are in a
sense powerful because they can perform certain tasks that could not be
performed in that manner before, but not in the way or sense that the quote meant
by the word powerful. I really don’t
think that the technologies themselves have minds or intents, or that they’re
working to reshape what we do and how we do it. I think that sometimes the
result of using them can change how we think or do certain things, but it’s not
like that was the technology’s intent. The result of changing how we do things
was human’s intent. We wanted a
different way of performing the task. The result of the way we think was not technology’s
intent either. It was just a byproduct from using the machine and could’ve most
likely been foreseen and expected by philosophers or psychologists. At the time
though, no one was thinking about what it would do to our minds. They were just
thinking about how it would help us accomplish certain advanced tasks more
quickly and efficiently.
If technology was powerful by themselves, that’s
basically implying that if we left the devices by themselves with no human
using them, they would work on their own. Of course if we leave them alone, for
example, a computer or phone would lose battery, maybe update itself, or shut
off. But those are things that we programmed
the technology to do. So basically they are not acting themselves, but acting because
of us and by us. If it really was powerful itself, I’d think of that as the
technology moving on its own or doing other actions that we would not expect it
to do.
In conclusion, I obviously disagree with the statement
that suggests technology is a powerful force acting to reshape human activity
and the meaning of our activity. The quote in Carr’s book reminds me of a horror
movie called Stay Alive. In the
movie, a group of friends play a video game and each one who dies in the game
dies in real life, suggesting that the video game (a technology) was
controlling real life events. To end this blog post, I’ll just say that movies
like these are fiction for a reason.
Jill Zalewski
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