Fighting the Tools of Our Nature: Technology in the Popular Imagination

Abstract

In this chapter we will look at some of the distinctive attitudes people take towards new technologies and how such feelings often cut sharply against the grain of how technology is actually deployed in human life. One of the significant questions of this book is “how do we define ‘technology’?”, and in the second chapter I’ll consider the key scholarly attempts to establish the term, but I can’t begin to wrangle with those ideas before acknowledging the more emotive side of the argument. In our received notions of what technology is, there is a strong discourse of resisting new devices and defining technology by what it is not, principally by saying that it is not “natural.” As we’ll see, such ideas can manifest in strange ways — technology is a human thing, that’s what makes it unnatural, and yet it is rarely seen as a part of our nature, at least until a new technology comes along to replace something successful in an existing field, in which case the older (and preferred) technology often tends to be positioned as now being the more natural, or more attuned to our being. Discussions of the new devices for e-reading will provide us with useful demonstrations of just these kinds of conflict, pointing us to the most vital issues for users involved in the early moments of accommodating new daily practices. But the same argumentative shape also repeats in a variety of cultural arenas, a sample of which will be explored below.