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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technological determinism | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:12:45.770046+00:00 | kb-cron |
Technological determinism seeks to show technical developments, media, or technology as a whole, as the key mover in history and social change. It is a theory subscribed to by "hyperglobalists" who claim that as a consequence of the wide availability of technology, accelerated globalization is inevitable. Therefore, technological development and innovation become the principal motor of social, economic or political change. Technological determinism has been defined as an approach that identifies technology, or technological advances, as the central causal element in processes of social change. It has been described by different scholars as "the belief in technology as a key governing force in society" (Merritt Roe Smith); as "the idea that technological development determines social change" (Bruce Bimber); and as the three-word logical proposition that "technology determines history"' (Rosalind H. Williams). It is the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an inevitable" course. Technological determinism presumes that technology dictates users' behaviors. Therefore, technological determinism implies that "technological progress equals social progress." Therefore, technological determinism is a common ideology in international development aid, assuming that the transfer of modern technology to underdeveloped contexts will lead to social and economic development in the context where it has been implanted. Key notions of this theory are separated into two parts. The first being that the development of the technology itself may also be separate from social and political factors, arising from "the ways of inventors, engineers, and designers following an internal, technical logic that has nothing to do with social relationships". As technology changes, the ways in which it is utilized and incorporated into the daily lives of individuals within a culture consequently affect the ways of living, highlighting how technology ultimately determines societal growth through its influence on relations and ways of living within a culture. To illustrate, "the invention of the wheel revolutionized human mobility, allowing humans to travel greater distances and carry greater loads with them". This technological advancement also leads to interactions between different cultural groups, advanced trade, and thus impacts the size and relations both within and between different networks. Other examples include the invention of language, expanding modes of communication between individuals, the introduction of bookkeeping and written documentation, impacting the circulation of knowledge, and having streamlined effects on the socioeconomic and political systems as a whole. As Dusek (2006) notes, "culture and society cannot affect the direction of technology...[and] as technology develops and changes, the institutions in the rest of society change, as does the art and religion of a society." Thus, technological determinism dictates that technological advances and social relations are inevitably tied, with the change of either affecting the other by consequence of normalization. This stance however ignores the social and cultural circumstances in which the technology was developed. Sociologist Claude Fischer (1992) characterized the most prominent forms of technological determinism as "billiard ball" approaches, in which technology is seen as an external force introduced into a social situation, producing a series of ricochet effects. Rather than acknowledging that a society or culture interacts with and even shapes the technologies that are used, a technological determinist view holds that "the uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself, that is, that its functions follow from its form" (Neil Postman). However, this is not the sole view of TD following Smith and Marx's (1998) notion of "hard" determinism, which states that once a technology is introduced into a culture what follows is the inevitable development of that technology. The other view follows what Smith and Marx (1998) dictate as "soft" determinism, where the development of technology is also dependent on social context, affecting how it is adopted into a culture, "and, if the technology is adopted, the social context will have important effects on how the technology is used and thus on its ultimate impact". For example, we could examine the spread of mass-produced knowledge through the role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation. Because of the urgency from the protestant side to get the reform off the ground before the church could react, "early Lutheran leaders, led by Luther himself, wrote thousands of anti-papal pamphlets in the Reformation's first decades and these works spread rapidly through reprinting in various print shops throughout central Europe".
== Hard and soft determinism == "Soft determinism", as the name suggests, is a more passive view of the way technology interacts with socio-political situations. Soft determinists still subscribe to the fact that technology is the guiding force in our evolution but would maintain that we have a chance to make decisions regarding the outcomes of a situation. This is not to say that free will exists, but that the possibility for us to roll the dice and see what the outcome exists. A slightly different variant of soft determinism is the 1922 technology-driven theory of social change proposed by William Fielding Ogburn, in which society must adjust to the consequences of major inventions, but often does so only after a period of cultural lag.