Technological determinism is circulated, maintained, and advanced within the pre-existing hierarchies in the world in which we live. Determinism has its own political agendas, its own rules, its own contexts and hierarchies and antagonisms to an imagined ‘other’. Determinism utilises a proprietary language and culture and although it cloaks itself in ideas of inter-disciplinary, deterministic discourse discourages intellectual critique, dissent, and justifies itself with the high ground of capitalist practicality. Deterministic rhetoric is only interested in other knowledge so that it can demonise it, remediate it, appropriate it, make it better, wrestle it out of the hands of the ‘elite’ and make it more ‘democratic’, more in touch with ‘the people’.
I wrote this some time ago (link). A rather disturbing report I recently read on Web 2 and Education prompted me to re-visit this writing
Leave a Reply