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We create tools to supplement or amplify our native capacities (We Are In…
We create tools to supplement or amplify our native capacities
Expressions of human will - seeking to expand our power and control over circumstances, nature, time, and distance
Enable us to reshape nature to better serve our needs and desires
Birth Control - gave women control over when to conceive
Reservoir
GMO corn plant
Extend our physical strength, dexterity or resilience
Darning needle
Fighter jet
Plow - changed the outlook of the farmer
Intellectual technologies are all of the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers.
Map- distance
Clock - time
Typewriiter
Books
Computers
Internet - opened up the world
Mental tools give us the greatest power over what and how we think.
Self-expression
Shape personal and public identity
Cultivating relations with others
(Carr, 2011, p. 45) "...the tools we use to write, read, and otherwise manipulate information work on our minds even as our minds work with them.
Promote new ways of thinking and "extend to the general population established ways of thinking that had been limited to a small elite group (Carr, 2011, p. 45)
Extend the range or sensitivity of the senses
Microscope - opened new worlds of mental exploration for the scientist
Amplifier
Geiger counter
Tools Control Us
Determinists
Thorstein Veblen - technological determinism
"autonomous force outside of man's control influencing the course of human history" (Carr, 2011, p. 46)
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Karl Marx - "Windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist" (Marx, 2008, p. 119)
Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind" (Emerson, 1994, p.63)
McLuhan - Humans are "sex organs of the machine world" (McLuhan, 2003, p.68). - helping machines to reproduce themselves until they're capable of doing it alone
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We Are In Control
Instrumentalists
Instrumentalists downplay the role of tools: David Sarnoff - "We can use them to accomplish our goals" (Carr, 2011, p. 46)
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James Carey - "Technology is technology, it is a means for communication and transportation over space, and nothing more" (Carey, 2008, p.107)
Tools shape the physical structure and workings of the human mind" (Carr, 2011, p. 48)
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Langdon Winner "If the experience of modern society shows us anything, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning" (Winner, 2004, p.105)
Human need has generated new technologies. However those technologies bring with them new experiences, and different needs, of which we may not have been aware.
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Each new technology leads to the next. The microscope led to many discoveries in the study of disease, for example, leading to other medical technologies
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