Political? Yes. Status Quo? Probably not so good.

            After spending almost a month in this class, it seems completely logical to state that technology is political. Slack and Wise define politics as “the power to articulate, to make arrangements of people, technologies, and languages, to make things happen or not, to give an assemblage its shape” (174).  In fact, we have already established the fact that technology is extremely pervasive in our society and that it is an “actor” in our lives as much as humans are. Therefore, it affects the trajectory of our lives just as much as other people and greater social forces. According to Langdon Winner, in his article, “Do Artifacts have Politics?” discusses the effects in that technologies either have specific features and uses that arrange our lives and effect the distribution of power and authority, or they beget a specific form of institutionalized power. Thus, as long as technologies continue to make things happen, they will remain political.

Yet, the general culture does not hold this view. Slack and Wise provide several reasons as to why the general culture does not think of technologies as political. First, we consider technology to be neutral in that it does not have an effect on anything until a human picks it up and uses it. They also explain that people only think of politics in the form of government and its effects on culture; it is a human centered concept, without any trace of technology. And lastly, our current views of technology are a part of the status quo that no one wants to disrupt. Technology as a social structure (something that “defines regular social life”) is so embedded in our society, we ignore it. Yet, it has an extremely important impact on how we as humans live and structure our lives. Slack and Wise call for new technologies to be assessed in the same way that new laws are, since they have just as a pervasive effect, which I completely agree with. However, the question is, how does one change the status quo of an entire culture? Will it have to start at a governmental level? Will the government take technologies serious enough to begin having juries that “pass” new technologies? Or will the government ignore these concepts until the idea is taken up by the people? Or will something major have to happen in order for this way of thinking to change?

Actually, I’m surprised that there are not more political activists for the regulation of technology (not the regulation of content in video games and T.V., but major technological advances). Perhaps these theories have not had enough time to seep into the general culture. Still, we cannot continue to pretend to have completely passive or completely active roles in our relationship with technology. We are equal actors with technology.