A stronger version of that approach sees technology discourse as assuming a more active role in the construction of reality, a reality that it presumes merely to describe. Here, technology discourse is seen as central to shaping the political, cultural, and social Zeitgeist. Nye, for example, argues that the “American technological sublime”—the reverence of technology in and of itself—has become at the turn of the twentieth century “one of America’s central ‘ideas about itself’” (Nye 1994, xiv), functioning to reaffirm and bind multicultural individuals into a society by celebrating and admiring technological achievements in the public sphere. Technology discourse played an equally central role in the construction of nationalistic culture in Germany’s Third Reich, where technological rationality was co-opted by irrational politics to create a political culture of “reactionary modernism” (Herf 1984), with technology helping to define the emerging German national fascist identity. Lastly, the emergence of the discourse on “the human motor” (Rabinbach 1992) during the nineteenth century was interwoven with scientific and technological transformations: the scientific “discovery” of the laws of energy was central to a revolution in the perception of humans as containers of energy, leading to new practices, such as Taylorism, which in effect rendered the human body a motor and mobilized it to the mechanical process of mass production.
The discourse on technology is anchored in the material and functional aspects of technology. It is precisely this anchoring in objective reality that renders it a discourse in the strong Foucauldian sense: a quasi-scientific set of truths, which are beyond dispute and hence serve as assumptions for further reflection on reality and engagement with it. It also points to the fact that a discourse is not an ideal construction—imposed on reality in order to veil it—but a lens through which reality is understood and acted upon. Such an approach, I believe, allows us to bypass the deadlock of causality (does the discourse on technology create a certain social reality or vice-versa?; does technology drive history?; and so forth; Smith and Marx 1994; Castells 1996, 5) and points to the dialectic relationship between the discourse on technology and social practices that are part of a new social totality (Rabinbach 1992, 52; Kern 1983).
THE DISCOURSE ON TECHNO<sub>L</sub>OGY AS LEGITIMATION DISCOURSE
The strongest version of this approach to the social study of technology sees technology discourse as a particular outlook, an ideology. According to this view—developed particularly by members of the Frankfurt School as part of a broader critique of instrumental reason—with modernity, and specifically with the harnessing of science and technology for the needs of capitalism and the modern state, technology discourse has come to play a central role in the legitimation of a techno-political order, that is, a political order that is legitimated by technology and techniques (see Horkheimer and Adorno, 1976). In this political context technology becomes an unquestionable “good,” a “religion” (Noble 1999), and a “myth” (Robins and Webster 1999, 151; Mosco 2004), which suggests that virtually any social problem is subject to a technical or technological fix (Aronowitz 1994; Segal 1985). It entails the substitution of technical and technological discussions, with their emphasis on instrumental rationality, for political debate based on communicative rationality and aimed at arriving at substantive rationality (Marcuse 1991; Habermas 1970; Feenberg 1991; Pippin 1995; Borgmann 1984b). The idea (indeed, the ideal) of technology gains in itself a constitutive role in society, becoming the point of departure and the yardstick against which other realms of society are examined and worked out; technology becomes “both means and the ends, the instrument of progress but also its fulfillment” (Robins and Webster 1999, 151). In sum, with modernity, “technology has become not just the material basis for society but in a real sense its social and ideological model as well” (Segal 1994, 3).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age