It looks like every year there are new know-how devices which take over the entire commercials we see on tv and online. Postman goes on to give us a structure of the media and we will now start to get a picture of how and why we get sucked-in wholly and fully and made part of the tradition and communication systems, and as consumers, turn into homogenized by the magnanimity and depth, breadth and extension (within the McLuhan sense) of all types of media and communication entities along with a new language and its meanings and effects on the mass media customers.
One commentator, W. E. Moore, has steered that ‘a more tenable formulation’ than the whole autonomy of technology may be that know-how is ‘a phase of culture more subject to alter than other facets of tradition, and subsequently probably of causal significance in social change’, adding that ‘under sure conditions this is likely to be correct’ (in Potter & Sarre 1974, p. 484).
I’m not so certain, and will write about how, since it’s the result of humanly-made economic choices, technological determinism will not be impartial.†My aim is to elucidate 1) how technological determinism gave us the Fukushima meltdowns at the very same time that president Obama insisted that we will need to have 30 new nuclear energy plants (& the BP gulf spill on the time he was extolling offshore drilling), and a pair of) how most of the areas†sired by technological determinism have turned in exitless traps.
Langdon Winner, a political scientist, also argues that technologies are not politically neutral in the sense that they are generally designed, intentionally or not, to open sure social options and to close others, and a few applied sciences could also be extra suitable with some social patterns than with others (in MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985).
McLuhan offered his readers a challenge to change into conscious of ‘new environments’ as they are entering into a bath: “The within viewpoint would coincide with the practical point of view of the person who would somewhat eat the turtle than admire the design on its identical man would somewhat dunk himself in the newspaper than have any esthetic or intellectual grasp of it s character and meaning.” Stepping into a newspaper is inevitable; perceiving it as an ‘surroundings’ is indispensable to understanding its energy and effect.