Technology Adoption as Ideology

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we have dealt generally with the arguments that underpin some of the ill-founded rationalisations about the technology we have, and how they are being extrapolated into evidence for the shape of the future. Both strains of the argument we have seen about technology as a creative force are based on contextualising and connecting the massive impact of digital technology we are experiencing as really the latest in a much longer technical narrative. In the first case, the history of technology is defined as the form ideas take, then represented as evidence for enthusiastic support of its most recent manifestation, in our case, the digital. As has been noted, sometimes this takes the form of technological Darwinism of the more brutal kind, with the social version not very far behind it. The idea that displacing prevailing technological paradigms always produces something categorically better is the ideology that reinforces the notion of technological evolution as an inherently just process. It is seen as unstoppable, logical and filled with the promise of economic benefits through innovation wrought from disruption. This, I have argued, puts a false face on the processes of technology, which have far more in common with the partiality of business models than the disinterestedness of science or imaginative leaps of creative practice.