John Walters makes a nice distinction between strong and weak technological determinism:
"When someone like McLuhan or Ong describes what happened in the past to get us where we are now, they can appear to be engaging in a strong deterministic model because they don’t focus on the branches we could have followed but one the path we did follow.3 We need to make sure that when we read someone who explains that X lead to Y we recognize that this does not necessarily mean that they are arguing that X had to lead to Y (strong determinism), but that Y was one of the possible futures resulting from X and just happens to be part of the future we followed. Likewise, when providing accounts of technological development, we need to remember to not fall into the strong model fallacy, even when there really was only one possible future."
I'll have to see if this helps my students make sense of the technological determinism debate.
Friday, January 25, 2008
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11 comments:
Mcluhan? I've heard of that guy. Mara has nothing but bad things to say about him, mostly disgusting personal habits.
Why don't you come over to our blog and defend him?
http://rhetpoet.blogspot.com/
I'm terribly, terribly interested in Mcluhan, but I wonder what his usefulness is in today's new media studies. Therefore, Kevin, would you, David Letterman style, be willing to come up with the top ten reasons to study Mcluhan as a graduate student? When you've completed this task, would you post it to our (royal We) blog?
http://rhetpoet.blogspot.com/
Many thanks for your forthcoming zesty response. A fellow Mcluhanan.
Oh, and Doc Mara had absolutely nothing to do with this series of posts.
nothing at all.
Kevin, Jennie and I agree with you. We think that you should write a McLuhan blog on our Rhetpoet blog to further enlighten us. By missing this opportunity to further our theoretical knowledge would be doing us a great disservice.
Kevin, Paula and I agree with you. You should write more about McLuhan on our Rhetorics and Poetics class blog. It would be a very educational experience for us.
This is the place to help out my poor, benighted students.
I'm so ashamed...
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