Is Technology Neutral?

Text Exploration

I don’t know what “technology” is.

Melvin Kranzberg declared that “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral,” and that’s cute. In this text, Robert Whelchel quotes Melvin Kranzerg, but then decides to ask if technology is value free, which is a “clearly better way to state the question.”

Whelchel uses technology in what he admits is a “very broad sense,”—broad enough to include “the entire body of methods and materials used in combining science and art to produce items and concepts to satisfy industrial, commercial, and social objectives,” and so Kranzberg and Whelchel (and, later, Heidegger, Pirsig, Ortega, Tocqueville, Florman, and the many other characters included in the text) consider if everything is good or bad or neutral or valuable or free of value.

Maybe they are all talking about “digital technology”, which is still so broad as to be almost everything, or “technological advancement” as things we can do now that we couldn’t do before, which is everything, or automation or mechanization or things without people. Or something else. Or everything else.

Whelchel seems to realize that everything can’t be technology without nothing being technology, and so he explains that “a simple way to establish that technology does possess values is to list some of them that I think everyone would agree to,” and then declares that “a representative list of major value components present in any technical enterprise is: objectivity, quantification, and utilitarianism.” So perhaps all of the science and art and methods and materials and industry and society that he describes really means things that are objective and quantifiable and useful, and so technology is a positivist lens on all things.

Which makes technology a lens for looking.

I don’t know what technology is, and I don’t think Whelchel knows what it is either. Both of us do seem to know that “technologists need to become more articulate about technology,” and I appreciate that he is including himself (“we”), but I don’t think he would consider me as we, given that I don’t strive for objectivity, quantification or utilitarianism.

We used to have a greeting card on our fridge that said “never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.” The phrase is attributed to Robert A. Heinlein, who I just learned from Wikipedia was, unfortunately, a science-fiction writer instead of a funny greeting card writer. Asking if technology is neutral is like asking if guns kill people or if people kill people, and is also like teaching a pig to sing.