Technological Determinism

McCluhan, “Two Selections...”
Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory...”
Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,”

All three readings address the effect of technology on society and include observations about the communication process, from the relationship between individual human perception and media to political and cultural shifts that emerge in communication.

McLuhan relies on historical and literary examples more than Enzensberger and Baudrillard, who concern themselves more with the Marxist implications of media in this particular set of writings. At the center of all of this (I’m being deliberately facetious by positing a center) is how the individual’s experience becomes altered by technology—the Frankenstein effect. Is technology a curse or a savior? No easy binaries here, so maybe we can propose a dialectic, as Enzensberger and Baudrillard discuss.

All three writings address Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” at least once, in which Benjamin considers the ability of a work of art to contain an “aura,” which he defines as the sense that a work has of belonging to a particular space and time. Aura posits a value in art that traditionally created a distance of the art object from the viewer, which was a metaphysical, even mystical, power of art held over from art's historical association with ritual and religion. Aura creates a paradoxical distance that is experienced in the presence of the original art and is not a distance of physical proximity. But new technologies allow more audiences to see an original work of art in a reproduced form, such that aura is lost. This loss is, however, democratizing, since more people have access to a work of art than in the past. The "loss" of aura signifies a liberation of art from elitism and marks its "ownership" by the public. Such public ownership is not unlike that of audiences of publicly available online literary texts, works of art that could potentially be more accessible than ever before in the past.

The individual’s response to art thus reflects—or is part of—the process of automation, a transitory and ever-moving, evolving, self-reflexive relationship. But it’s critical to see that technological determinism is at work in these readings. (I wrote the following on a class wiki last semester.) Technological determinism is a phrase used to describe the belief that technology shapes (determines) the course of a society. It posits that more than any other force, technology causes social change, a view which subsumes other controlling factors, such as economics, patriarchy, or class, for example. Not only could technological determinism be seen as opposed to social determinism, it could also be seen as robbing the individual of agency.
In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin (2000) argue that Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969) constitutes technological determinism, as well as McLuhan's work (including Understanding New Media, 1964). Bolter and Grusin outline their view of technological determinism explicitly, arguing that they "propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (p. 77).

There are a number of topics that develop from these observations—one could consider Taylorism and Fordism; power and Foucault; the huge topic of intellectual copyright and the Internet….the author and the artist…