technological determinism: what it is

By Kurt Heidinger on Apr 17, 2011 in Director's Notes, endosymbiosis, evolution, technological determinism

Technological determinism is a phrase that describes how technology influences human evolution:
how who we are is determined by the tools we invent and use. Id like you to start using it to
understand why the world is what it is today.
A perfect example of technological determinism: cell phones. Twenty years ago there were none;
today theyre everywhere. Weve witnessed a few ways that they are influencing our evolution.

First, theyve made the world much smaller, by making it possible for people to connect just about
anywhere, anytime. This connectivity has enhanced the homogenizing effects of economic
globalization, while also making it easy for governments and corporations to track our movements;
conversely, they have made it possible for whistleblowers and revolutionaries to get their messages
out while cultural change is occurring, while increasing the speed of that change.
Second, the connectivity-aspect turns most cellphone-carrying youths into texting addicts, a kind of
human being we have no previous record of: anew kind of human.
Third, driving has become noticeably unsafer because many drivers lose their concentration as they
use their cellphones.
Marshall McLuhan was one of the clearest thinking and most enthusiastic proponents of
technological determinism, and is famous for saying the medium is the message. Rightly, he
concluded that technologysuch as the printing press, radio and TVcreated new spaces for
humans to inhabit and exist mentally and physically in; and as people adapted to these new spaces,
they changed: they evolved. The printing press gave us the Gutenberg Bible, which gave us

Protestantism, etc etc. Radio gave us popular music, Hitler & FDR. TV gave us JFK and couch
potatoes.
McLuhan, by and large, was a booster, a technological utopian; he put a positive spin on
technological determinism, because the arrival of new technologies seemed always to open new
spaces and therefore, new frontiers where freedom-lovers could dash to escape the strictures of
older, crowded, stagnating spaces. He was writing in the 1960s when Apollo missions were
increasing the presence of humanity in the solar system, MLK was leading our nation to end racism,
and the green revolution was reducing the cost of food while bringing all kinds of new foods into the
supermarkets.
Because new technologies opened spaces, McLuhan thought that technological was a neutral
force of human evolution. It was, objectively considered, neither good or badfor example, the
same cell phone technology used to trigger car-bombs is also used to call an ambulance.
I am not so sure, and will write about how, since it is the result of humanly-made economic
decisions, technological determinism is not neutral. My goal is to explain 1) how technological
determinism gave us the Fukushima meltdowns at the exact same time that president Obama
insisted that we must have 30 new nuclear power plants (& the BP gulf spill at the time he was
extolling offshore drilling), and 2) how many of the spaces sired by technological determinism
have turned in exitless traps.

Fuente: http://biocitizen.org/technological-determinism-what-it-is-what-we-cando-about-it

Questions
1 Why cellphones is a best example about technological determinism?
Cell phones are a good example of technological determinism because greatly
influences in the change in humans since there is no need to be together for
communicates because now with the technological advancement in the cell can
be connected despite being in the other side of the world and this helps in all
aspects of our lives.
2 how the technological determinism has changed human beings?
Overall, there has been a drastic change in humans in recent times, since
technological advances have affected in good or bad form the way people live,
work, etc. Mainly in the workplace, because the technology helps a lot so that
the employees can do better their duties in this.
3 which is the trap that the author writes ?.

The author talks about that technological determinism to get to affect the
government and that sometimes was used negatively for these becoming in
traps for others.