No, Technology Is Not Neutral
Our tools change the way we think by shaping the terms in which we see reality
Our technologies pervade each area of our lives. While we use them to make life easier and overall better, we are often ignorant to see how deep they influence the way we make sense of the world and ourselves.
“The medium is the message,” Marshal McLuhan wrote famously in his 1964 work Understanding Media.
Observing, how the upcoming technology of TV and radio changed not only the way of transmission but the content itself, he noted:
“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given an-other medium as ‘content.’ The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
Drawing on McLuhan in his project, Nicholas Carr explores in his book The Shallows — what the Internet is doing to our Brain, how technology shaped not only the content they transmit but how they influence our way to think, map and conceptualize reality. He notes that “in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium mould what we see and how we see it — and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.”
What he primarily points out is that technology is never just a tool. To understand it we need not only know how it transmits information, but how the way it does shape our way of thinking.
Our tools serve as expressions of how we see and need to see the world. How we map out reality tells more about us, our beliefs, needs, hopes and fears than reality itself. However, this is also true for the reverse: over time, our reality approaches the map we draw.
The map, for example, had a major impact on how it as a tool shaped the human understanding of our surroundings.
Carr describes the progression of maps as progress of increasingly abstract thinking and conceptualizing of our surroundings. About the map as a “translation of a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon” he writes:
“Maps came to be used not only to represent vast regions of the earth or heavens in minute detail, but to express ideas — a plan of battle, an analysis of the spread of an epidemic, a forecast of population growth.”
But the map did not only change the way we describe and frame ideas and experiences. It also led to a profound change in the terms in which we think.
“The more frequently and intensively people used maps”, Carr writes, “the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms.”
This change in the terms in which we are used to seeing, think and understand reality is but one way of how technologies shape our understanding.
A second way is a change in what Carr calls our intellectual ethic. Besides encouraging different means to make sense of the world and ourselves, each technology is based upon a set of assumptions about reality, including its problems and struggles.
Intellectual technologies, that is, technologies that serve as tools for our thinking have by far the biggest impact on our worldview.
Other than technologies that extend our physical strength, the range of sensitivity of our senses or that shape the environment in a way to serve our needs, intellectual technologies change the way we find, classify and share knowledge. Carr writes:
“Intellectual technologies, when they come into popular use, often promote new ways of thinking or extend to the general population established ways of thinking that had been limited to a small, elite group. Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.”
While each technology is created to solve the problems and fulfil the needs of their time, Carr argues, it is the set of assumptions it is based upon which often has the biggest impact in the long run.
While the map and the clock made the world appear in terms of measurable units and allowed to represent underlying patterns of in their case time and space onto a representation, today’s technologies try to do the same with rather social aspects like affection, approval and popularity.
Social media allows us to map human interaction in terms of likeability, approval and taking a stance towards other people, their work and opinion.
Approval and likeability can be conveyed through likes, upvotes and shares. The conversation is largely represented through comments or reactions to an already expressed statement.
Starting out as attempts to mimic human interaction it in turn shaped and changed the way we communicate and interact with one another.
Although rarely recognized by its inventors, it is the worldview that gave rise to a technology which brings about the deepest changes.
For example, reading and writing have changed as the technologies for transmitting written knowledge did.
It was the invention of the printing press, Carr argues, that paved the way for the rise of individualism we experienced since the 18th century in the western world.
By making written word available to a large audience, the printing press radically changed the prevalent mode of thinking. Before, few people could read, and knowledge was transferred orally by storytelling or practically taught by apprenticeship. Information was bound to social situations and transmission and only a small part of the population could acquire knowledge privately.
Carr writes, “Books allowed readers to compare their thoughts and experiences not just with religious precepts, whether embedded in symbols or voiced by the clergy, but with the thoughts and experiences of others. The social and cultural consequences were as widespread as they were profound, ranging from religious and political upheaval to the ascendancy of the scientific method as the central means for defining truth and making sense of existence.”
Just like the printing press changed the way people read and in turn, how people thought and how they interacted with the ideas and their surroundings, so did the web today as the most prevalent example.
Today, the fast sharing of large amounts of data allows for knowledge to be both, cheaper and timelier. The value of most of the content on the web is determined by how much it gets shared and how new it is.
The way content is transmitted by the web encourages a different mode of reading and in turn, of writing.
For example, while, on average, we read more written words than ever before, we engage less with long-form content, but with short snippets of text in the form of tweets, articles, captions and text messages. This way we can absorb more information in less time, however, we are less likely to engage with an idea or an argument the same way we do when it takes us 50 pages and about two hours to read it.
Most of the time, we are out for information, not for understanding. We are out for small pieces with dense information, not for getting lost, reflecting on an idea or being open-minded about a different way of seeing things. Sure, we can still do and value those, the point is they are usually not the reasons for us to engage with content on the web.
In our daily lives, it is both the terms in which we frame experience and think about it which is shaped by the technologies and tools we use and the set of assumptions they are based upon that influence how we evaluate and reflect on them.
Our knowledge is always shaped and influenced by the tools we use and the needs and problems that gave rise to those technologies.
The point Carr stresses in his book is that to understand our technologies, we need to stop looking at them as neutral tools. Instead, we need to take into account not only how they transmit content, but how they encourage the mode of thinking we engage in when we use them.
If we want to understand ourselves, we need to pay attention to both, how our understanding of reality gives rise to the maps we create and how our maps, in turn, shape the conceptualization of reality.