J astra taylor

Part 2 (hybrid). Taylor (2014:6) argues that how questions about technology are framed is important, and that we “[grant] agency to tools while side stepping the thorny issue of the larger social structures in which we and our technologies are embedded.” In your own words attempt to describe what Taylor is trying to tell us.

In this selection from the preface to The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor makes the case that our examinations of the influence of technology on our lives concentrate too much on the effects of the tools rather than asking questions about the cultural environment that gives rise to them or enables certain use cases. The crux of the argument is a capitulation to technological determinism where humanity is shaped by the tool, rather than utilizing the tool to build out (or tear down) the society we’ve already conceptualized. That technology is inherently deterministic is a question unresolved by anthropologists and social scientists. While it can certainly be said that certain tools have altered the global landscape, there was typically a material or social need that gave rise to the creation of those tools and a cultural engine that drove expanded use of the tool.

It brings to mind the idea of whether objects have lives of their own rather than an inherently anthropocentric meaning or whether objects and users exist in a kind of symbiosis whereby neither are more relevant than the other. Latour and Harman, branching out of Heidegger, examine this concept at length. It is only recently that this principle is being applied to contemplation of the digital landscape, particularly through the lens of unpacking the orientation of design as in Tony Fry and Clive Dilnot.

Divining the agency to objects exists within a larger metaphysical realm outside the bounds of what can be adequately quantified by the promised data deluge that we are breathlessly told my techno-optimists must be mined to best understand our relationship to the world around us. Taylor seems to suggest that no such mining can take place without first examining the structure of the world we live in, including its trenchant inequalities and the governing ideologies. Further, there is the implication that it is our reluctance to question our social structures that may foment techno-deterministic sentiments.