The uncovering and overcoming of these problematic assumptions (often denounced as “technological determinism”) have underpinned critical approaches to technology, which suggest that society shapes technology. Such approaches seek to introduce social coordinates into the analysis of technology construction, dissemination, and use.<sup>1</sup> These critical approaches share “an insistence that the ‘black-box’ of technology must be opened, to allow the socio-economic patterns embedded in both the content of technologies and the processes of innovation to be exposed and analyzed” (Williams and Edge 1996). Likewise, late Marxist analysis has been particularly fruitful in uncovering the extent to which technologies of production have been means in the arsenal of class struggle, rather than the mere implementation of universal instrumental rationality (Braverman 1974; Noble 1984; Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994; Huws 2003).
Despite the contrast between these two approaches, both share an engagement with technology as an instrument. The third intervention into the relationship between technology and society—and the one that informs this book—focuses on technology as discourse—cultural, social, political, and ideological. According to this approach, the discourse on technology is not simply a reflection of the centrality of technology in the operation of modern societies; rather, it plays a constitutive role in their operation and enables precisely that centrality. Some see technology discourse as a form of “projection” (Heffernan 2000) of social realities or a “technological vision” (Sturken and Thomas 2004) through which transformations of a political, economic, and social nature are filtered. Thus, for example, popular science fiction of the late twentieth century has articulated the new, post-Fordist relationship of production between capital and labor (Heffernan 2000), just as the emerging technology of the mechanical clock in seventeenth-century Europe played a central role as a metaphor and cognitive framework to deliberate the ideological debate between authoritarian and liberal conceptions of political order (Mayr 1986).
Capitalism<sub>,</sub> Technology<sub>,</sub> and the Digital Discourse
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