Talk:Technological determinism

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Emicla4. Peer reviewers: Whittae.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 10:46, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Structure:

• Should "Pessimism towards techno-science ... in academia" be under the main area or Criticism? Fullerian 00:43, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

The normal structure we try to use is called Summary style; this means that for a substantial article, the lead section should be a concise summary of the main points of the whole article, and the following sections should go into more detail. In this case... the negative assessment among many scholars is (I'd say) an important thing to mention about technological determinism, and should remain in the lead (though that bit could possible be trimmed), but it should also appear, with more details backing up the claim, in the Criticism section. At least, that's how I would do it.--ragesoss 01:27, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Technological determinism in anthropology/archaeology

Maybe something needs adding about the theories of Leslie White and Julian Steward. I'll do it if I get time soon! PatHadley (talk) 11:25, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Citations

The citations need some serious work. "(1997) isn't an appropriate citation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.111.117.176 (talk) 01:45, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Subset of technological determinism

I believe this session could be a little bit more expanded. Marshall McLuhan's views completely favored technological determinism when it comes to media. When he wrote that 'The Medium is the Message', the underlying meaning was that technology, or the media in this case, is what defines social and cultural scopes of human life instead of the other way around, like pointed out by Raymond Williams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams . Such deterministic ideas grow even further when McLuhan says media is an extension of the body.. I believe we should include such information in the article. What do you think? Cheers, Zalunardo8 (talk) 10:39, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Upon closer inspection, the section is largely original research. "Media determinism" is not a term commonly used as discernible from technological determinism and the sources provided (as well as those I found in a search when AfDing Media determinism just now, do not use the term "media determinism," or use the term as synonymous with technological determinism. McLuhan uses the term "media" in such a broad way that, starting with him, technological determinism would be a subset of media determinism! He and Innis, along with the whole media ecology bunch are frequently accused of being technological determinists. This appears to be someone's pet term or is otherwise unnecessarily specific (without actually being so). I had removed the content, but then saw that what I thought was already in the rest of the article wasn't, so restored it until it can be better worked in. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  15:47, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Article seems to need a whole lot of work. Anybody want to join me to make a big push at improving it in the next several days? (I won't have time to start on it until tomorrow at least, unfortunately). --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  15:50, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

References

Update

I think that the Origin section is a bit vague so I added some information for clarity in the context of the section's purpose. Let me know if there are problems with my edit. By the way, I hope you guys wanting to make a big push are still around :) so we could improve this article further. Regards, Darwin Naz (talk) 02:54, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Criticism

Critiques in the academic and popular world in this section focus on the socially determined nature of technological determinism, stating that rather than technology having a simple cause and effect formula on the social world, it operates within a complex economic and socio-political networks, and thus social effects are caused by the interactions and contexts of these networks with technology. While this is a valid and key criticism of the theory, it is also a critique of the "hard deterministic" view. The soft view does view technological affects on society as a result of its interactions with other contextual factors within society.

This section should also include views of other deterministic theories such as linguistic determinism, stating that the way individuals operate is dictated by language, biological determinism, stating that social phenomena is determined by genetic factors. It is important to include these contrasting views on what factors are the determining drivers of society and history because these key deterministic theoretical debates also reveal flaws in technological deterministic views, such as previous criticisms on "hard" determinism in its simple cause-effect formula. These contrasting deterministic theories also show the network or possible interactions of social and historical drivers, rather than viewer each driver as the key determinant, favouring "soft" determinism. Q00p1d (talk) 07:06, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Marx was not a technological determinst

As the German version of this article correctly points out, people falsely accuse Marx being a technology determinist. Marx made the specific configuration of productive forces responsible for societal development. Productive forces are not just means of production (technology) but also include the labor forces as well as natural, organisational, intellectual and scientific resources available to a society for the production of goods. Moreover, a technology determinist would hardly claim that transferring the means of production into the hands of the workers is a revolutionary act. For the technology determinist, that would not make any difference. Dormux (talk) 19:33, 17 January 2024 (UTC)