Technology and politics

I found Winner’s idea that technical things have political qualities very interesting. After many class discussions determining that technology is a major influence in today’s culture, we might be able to understand that its effect can influence almost anything, such as politics in the society. In Winner’s article he says “that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns.” This explains the effects that technologies can either have a physical arrangement or fundamental change to the exercise of power and experience of citizenship. This article seems to think that as long as technologies continue to make things change and have the power to make things happen, they will be political.

             We’ve discussed in class that these topics of theories are just ways of making things easier to understand. In Winner’s article the theory of technological politics suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics because it could identify those certain technologies as a political occurrence in their own right. But I’m not sure if this theory helped me to understand that technology can be political or not. I’ve always thought that people can be political, not actual things. The article says that what matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is set in. But doesn't that kind of prove the point that technology itself is not political, it's the environment around those technologies that make it political?