Fourth Law: Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
Fourth Law: Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
Understanding technologies requires also understanding power; it needs media literacy as well as technical literacy; incisive questioning as well as shock and awe.
Rachel Coldicutt • On Understanding Power and Technology
I used to be much more of a technological determinist, where I believed that the course of history would play out according to what was technologically possible, and that technology shapes our world in a strong way. I've come to appreciate that culture actually plays such a large role in shaping our world. The ways in which people decide to use tec... See more
The Old is Dying
The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
determinism—interpreting some device as single-handedly steering social outcomes and thereby denying the role of people in shaping their own cultures and power structures.