Yeah, I know I’ve been slack about responding to comments, and I’m feeling guilty about it. I’ll try to set aside the time tomorrow; today, I spent most of the day stranded in a New England city an hour from home (more like 90 minutes in this morning’s snow) while I waited for the dealership to try to find the electrical problem in my car that my local garage still couldn’t find after three visits. The good news, I suppose, is that I got most of the way through Andrew Feenberg.
Feenberg, in 2002’s Transforming Technology (Oxford University Press; an updating of his 1990 Critical Theory of Technology), points out that “Although technologies are first and foremost tools for solving practical problems, they are not fully understandable in functional terms. This is especially true in cases where their function is itself in dispute” (107) — and of course this is the very thing I’ve been trying to get at in describing the differences between the liberal and vocational education models and how they connect to computers in the classroom. Naturally, I was pretty psyched to see this, and even more so with what came next.
Feenberg continues: “As we have seen with computers, these disputes are not merely technical but go to the cultural significance of the technology. The critical theory of technology is therefore a cultural theory” (107). Precisely, and this is why I’m so interested in trying to apply open-source methods to the writing classroom: not because of their applicability in solving specific problems, but because they foster a shift in the cultural values we associate with the computer — which is itself a material artifact of culture. Such methods are not simply tools for tasks, but sets of cultural practices that themselves reveal perspectives and possibilities heretofore obscured by other sets of cultural practices.
Feenberg later points out that “in the late nineteenth century, a rather narrow and socially restricted conception of humanity was replaced by a much broader one” in that “We value human life, and especially the lives of working people, more than did our predecessors” even despite the fact that “In the early days of abolitionism and labor regulation, all the economic arguments were on the side of the opponents of the new view” (146). Furthermore, Feenberg contends, “It was not an economist but the novelists Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe who played a major role in the moral evolution of English-speaking people by helping middle-class readers achieve a fuller affective identification with the lowest members of their societies” to the point where “the evolution of moral sentiments, by altering the definition of human being, opened up new ways of having, and our society is the richer for it” (146). So: in the paragraph above, I borrowed a very brief argument from Feenberg that — in the feminist vein of the personal being political — the technological is cultural. Here, I’d like to extend that to suggest, with Feenberg’s examples of Dickens and Stowe, how the cultural might shape the economic and vice versa, in a sort of dialetical relationship, despite the widespread conventional depiction of economy-as-juggernaut which all must serve. And, again, this is another reason for my interest in open-source methods and practices; the hope that there might be, in our lifetimes, the beginnings of an economic reorientation away from competition and scarcity.
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