The false opposition between culture and technology

© Rose Borschovski aka Saskia Boddeke

The strong tendency to separate technology from the world of humans, as if it were an autonomous protagonist—separate from society and culture—makes sense only within a view that ignores the human component of technical reality. Could this misoneism represent a genuine hatred of novelty? Much of the answer to what we today call contemporary alienation lies in this question.

In Gilbert Simondon’s view 1, “(…) the strongest cause of alienation in the contemporary world lies in this ignorance of the machine, which is not an alienation caused by the machine, but by the non-knowledge of its nature and its essence […]” (Simondon, 2008: 169). It is interesting to draw a parallel between Simondon’s thought and that of Pierre Lévy 2: “Even assuming that three entities do indeed exist: technique, culture and society, rather than emphasizing the impact of technologies we could just as well assert that technologies are products of a society and of a culture” (Lévy, 2000: 23).

This clarified analysis, from both thinkers, intends to (re)affirm that there is a large degree of indeterminacy in human relations mediated by new communication tools; on the other hand, there is a technicism that is nothing more than an idolatry of the machine, “a technocratic aspiration to unconditional power” (Simondon, 2008: 170).

In this context, the new networked communication tools are seen as a web that threatens humans, endowed with a soul and a separate existence, capable of producing the most varied and harmful feelings, casting them into an abyss of permanent and irreversible submission that destroys their social relations and pushes them toward the fleeting and the diffuse—a scenario that curtails the most basic freedom. That same human who, according to Simondon, has a culture that would not allow him to speak of objects or characters painted on a canvas as true realities possessing an interiority, a will good or bad (Simondon, 2008). In this approach to the human/technique relationship we see a blatant ambivalence: technical objects as mere tools versus objects animated by hostile intentions that represent “a permanent danger of aggression, of insurrection” (Simondon, 2008: 170).

Information networks—dependent on a high degree of technology—where binary flow travels through machine - mediated infrastructures and is supported by various sets of coded languages, are founded, to some extent, on a broad margin of indeterminacy. There, humans cannot escape their role as permanent organizers, like a conductor, conditioning the flow of data both by its nature and by its use:

True relations are therefore not woven between technology (which would be of the order of cause) and culture (which would suffer the effects), but between a multitude of human protagonists who invent, produce, use and interpret techniques in different ways (Lévy, 2000: 23).

This degree of human indeterminacy underlying the use of machines, of technology and, by familiarity, of networked communication tools, will be the key to their correct—or incorrect—use.

Bibliography

• Lévy, P. (2000). Cibercultura. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget. Simondon, G. (2008). Cultura e Técnica. Revista NADA, 11, 168–175.

Footnotes

1. Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) was a philosopher and professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and published, among others: Du monde d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958); L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964); and L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989).↩︎ ↩︎

2. Pierre Lévy (Tunisia, 1956) is an information philosopher who studies the interactions between the Internet and society (Cf. Wikipedia [online]. Accessed May 9, 2010 at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_L%C3%A9vy.↩︎ ↩︎