Technological or Media Determinism
Associated with technological determinism is reification. To reify is to 'thingify': to
treat an abstraction as a material thing.
What is 'Technology'?
Reifying 'Technology' involves treating it as
if it were a single material thing with a homogeneous, undifferentiated character.
This notion can be seen as a kind of 'essentialism'. In common and academic usage,
the word 'technology' is variously used to refer to tools, instruments, machines,
organizations, media, methods, techniques and systems. And as Jonathan Benthall
notes, 'virtually any one of a wide range of technical innovations can stand
symbolically for the whole of technology... The symbolic field of technologies is
interconnected' (Benthall 1976, p. 22).
The problem is that it is easy to slip into generalizations about 'Technology'.
Philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger treated technology as
a monolithic phenomenon. And Jacques Ellul, a French sociologist, adopted the
even broader umbrella of 'technique', by which he referred to 'the totality of methods
rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency... in every field of human
activity' (Ellul 1964, p. v). The linking of computers with other technologies is also
making it increasingly difficult to make clear distinctions between different media.
Technology is often seen as a whole which is more than the sum of its parts,
or various manifestations. However, as Seymour Melman observes 'there is no
machine in general' (1972, p. 59). Similarly, the umbrella term 'mass
communication' covers a multitude of very different media. And even categories
such as 'writing', 'print', 'literacy', 'television' or 'the computer' encompass
considerable diversity. Referring loosely to such abstract categories is hazardous.
Some technologies may also be less determining than others; the flexibility or
'openness' of tools varies. And of course a technology cannot be cut off as a separate
thing from specific contexts of use: technology has many manifestations in different
social contexts. A single technology can serve many quite different purposes.
Reification is a difficult charge to avoid, since any use of linguistic
categorization (including words such as 'society' or 'culture') could be said to
involve reification. Theorizing about technology and society is full of reification,
quite apart from these two key terms. Reification is involved when we divide
human experience into 'spheres' variously tagged as 'social', 'cultural', 'educational',
'political', 'ideological', 'philosophical', 'religious', 'legal', 'industrial', 'economic',
'scientific' or 'technological'. If such separation proceeds beyond analytical
convenience it also involves what is called structural autonomy, a theme which I
will examine in a moment.
Lived experience is a seamless web, but academia in particular encourages
specialists to indulge in reductionist interpretation. Structuralist sociological
theories emphasize that social institutions interact as an inter-related system; none
act as independent 'causes' (although theorists differ in the importance which they
ascribe to particular factors). It is not adequate to suggest that what shapes
technology is science, since science is also socially shaped, and technology also
influences science (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985, p. 8). Rather than being 'outside'
society, technology is an inextricable part of it.
The debate over technology and society is typically polarized into an
emphasis either on technological factors or on socio-cultural factors. Within this
reificatory framework economic factors tend to be lumped either with technological
ones or with socio-cultural ones. I should add that whilst reification is a strong
criticism for materialist theorists, to other theorists who reject epistemological
realism (which posits the purely objective existence of things in the world)
reification is hardly meaningful as a criticism, since (as one's stance approaches
epistemological idealism) things are what we make with words.