Technology, choice and the good life: Questioning technological

liberalism
Taylor Dotson
*
,1
Science and Technology Studies Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Sage Building 5th Floor, Troy, NY 12180-3590, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 6 April 2012
Received in revised form 19 September 2012
Accepted 12 October 2012
Keywords:
Technological liberalism
Material agency
Choice
Affect
The good life
a b s t r a c t
Technologies should be recognized as impacting personal choice concerning the good life.
Yet, technological liberalism the idea that technology permits an extending of individual
volition concerning the good without distortion remains a dominant collective belief. It is
not enough to recognize that technologies can serve as radical monopolies or script
human action. They also inuence human action and choice in terms of cognition and
affect. Technologies-of-choice can be viewed as enabling the belief that one may act as an
unencumbered self, even though they do not unequivocally extend the human will.
Consideration of the impact of technologies on human volition suggests possible avenues
of research into when and how technologically reexive decision making may actually
occur as well as how societies could create space for technologies more compatible with
alternative notions of the good, such as that exemplied in the philosophy of Albert
Borgmann. Yet, the task of enabling a wider deployment of more focal or communitarian
kinds of technology is far from straightforward.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Contemporary scholarship concerning technology and
society pays too little attention to the shaping power of
technology on human choice-making and its ramications
for the pursuit of the good life. Scholars in the eld of
Science and Technology Studies (STS), for instance, gener-
ally seem more interested in discussing the social, cultural
and technical aspects of being than the personal. There are
plenty of conversations concerning political and social
movements, the process of innovation or epistemological
esoterica, but the eld is relatively silent on the subject of
how one is to live and nd meaning in a technological
society. I do not mean to argue that the former are unim-
portant, of course, but that the latter merits more attention.
There are a large number of articles for example, investi-
gating neoliberal governmentality and the protesting of cell
phone masts [1] but far too few inquiring about the role of
cell phones in meaningful social relationships. The main
contemporary question concerning good technologies
appears to be: Is it green, democratic and socially respon-
sible? No doubt, this question should concern technology
scholars; yet, such inquiries do not completely exhaust the
depth or breadth of the role of technology in the human
condition.
Such a state of affairs is not actually all that surprising. It
may merely reect the contemporary western belief that
the good life is purely a matter of individual responsibility.
That is, if there is a problem with technology and the
pursuit of happiness or human ourishing, it is simply that
the neutral space necessary for individuals to explore and
personally construct the technological good life for them-
selves may be threatened by something like governmental
malfeasance or income inequality. Within this paradigm of
* Tel.: 1 5187032564.
E-mail address: dotsot@rpi.edu.
1
Taylor Dotson is currently a PhD student in the Department of Science
and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with interests
in the philosophy of technology, the good life and the study of commu-
nity. He has also been an applied mathematician and a tribal college
mathematics instructor.
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Technology in Society
j ournal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ t echsoc
0160-791X/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2012.10.004
Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336
thought, the choices and abilities afforded by technologies
are generally assumed to extend human volition in
a straightforward and unproblematic way. The potentially
restraining role of technology on choices concerning virtue
or well-being is too seldomacknowledged. Yet, the seeds of
doubt for this view already exist within the literature.
Specically, the individual autonomy of human decision
making appears to be increasingly questionable in light of
evidence showing how technological contexts can signi-
cantly shape human thinking and action.
As such, the question under consideration here is:
What are the limits of and the alternatives to the
extended volition paradigm of technology and the good
life? Also, what are the barriers to the wider enactment of
alternative technological modes of pursuing the good?
Such questions are in the spirit of a body of literature that
merits more attention in contemporary technology
scholarship. Pacey [2], Borgmann [3] and Csikszentmi-
halyi and Rochberg-Halton [4], for instance, have each
sought an understanding of things as shapers of self as
well as reectors of ones relationship with others and
the environment. Tatum [5], in his work on the Home
Power movement, ventured similar explorations of the
role that technologies play in frustrating or affording
individuals ability to put their values into action in daily
living.
There are, at least, three ways in which technology may
impact human decision making. The rst two are already
well established in the literature, but the last merits more
attention. This work will draw upon all three. First, the
extent or scale of certain technological systems may make
certain practices exceedingly difcult if not impossible.
Ivan Illich [6], for instance, considered how the system of
roads and highways in modern cities often results in
walking not being a viable transit option. He referred to this
situation as imposing a radical monopoly upon ones style
of living. Winner [7,8] has also contributed much to this
understanding of technology, describing technologies as
legislations. Kirkman [9] has more recently examined
how the obduracy of technological systems in the city
impacts the efcacy of ones strivings and erects barriers to
agency more generally. Second, as Latour [10] has argued,
technologies can script behavior. One of his main exam-
ples is the seat belt warning light, whose insistent bleeting
asks the driver not so politely to put on his or her seat
belt; most drivers end up eventually complying with the
wishes inscribed in the light. Verbeek [11] has referred to
such systems as materializing morality that is, moral
decision making. Finally, technologies are also emotion
evoking objects that inuence human practice in a more
subtle, psychological way. They constitute part of the
cognitive and affective ecology within which decision-
making occurs. That is, the cell-phone in a pants pocket,
a TV in a living room or an Internet-enabled computer on
a desk exert emotionally charged nudges on human choice.
This work differs from earlier ones by placing extra
focus on the third way in which technological agency
impacts emergent decision making. As such, it builds upon
the view of materiality developed in the performative
turn of STS. The performative turn is often overshadowed
by more well-known theories of material agency. However,
it is better compatible than the others with the psycho-
logically deep perspective pursued herein.
The line argument within this work will be at once
descriptive and prescriptive. It will begin with an illustra-
tion of the ways in which some modern technologies affect
choices in general and in regards to the good life. With this
illustration, the paradigm of technological liberalism the
idea that technologies can extend individual human voli-
tion, without distortion, in pursuit of the good life is
problematized. Focus is placed on both critiquing techno-
logical liberalism as not accurately reective of reality but
also questioning it in regards to human values. It is found
that technological contexts can and often do frustrate
attempts to put ones values into action, and the phenom-
enological experience of commodity led choice-making
may too often provide only an illusion of control but
nonetheless promise to materialize the moral decision-
making of the unencumbered liberal self. Finally, the
philosophy of Albert Borgmann is explored as a starting
point for developing an alternative framing of the good life
that acknowledges the role technologies play in shaping
ones practices, a framing based on not detachment and
consumer-like choices but committed engagement and
phronetic judgment.
Ultimately, the author maintains that because certain
technologies too often serve as barriers to the realization of
alternative practices and values the relationship between
technologies, choice and the good life is already and
unavoidably a public question and social problem; the
discourse of choice simply renders invisible the indirect
legislations that many modern technologies already
make on the good life.
2. An initial provocation: internet distraction and
freedom
This study both draws theoretical inspiration from and
aims to contribute to the performative turn in STS, as rep-
resented by Lucy Suchman [12], Andrew Pickering [13] and
others. Performative studies conceptualize humans as sit-
uated actors; actors whose behavior emerges temporally in
the conuence of themselves and the affordances and
resistances of their material and social worlds. That is,
human action not only shapes but is also shaped by its
material context. Neil Postman ([14, p. 18]), though exterior
to this literature, expressed a similar view of technology
when he argued that technological change is neither
additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. By this, he meant
that a change to societys technological context can have
dramatic, nonlinear and unexpected implications for the
dynamics of human practice. This view is strengthened
further if one understands human thinking and behavior as
fundamentally embodied. Indeed, social psychologists have
suggested that peoples higher mental processes are
scaffolded by their experiences with the physical world
[15]. Therefore, it may not be too large a leap to suggest
that, rather than existing as neutral means to purely user
dened ends, howtechnologies mediate embodied practice
can alter the scaffolding that frames human thinking.
This approach likely bears a supercial resemblance to
other theories of material agency, like Actor Network
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 327
Theory (ANT). There are several reasons why this work
follows Suchman and Pickering rather than Latour [16],
Callon [17] or Law [18]. First, the notion of actants is an
unnecessary construct for the cases under consideration
and arguably lends itself too easily to an inappropriate
degree of symmetry between humans and objects. The
theoretical shift toward treating objects as interest-laden
actants, even if only semiotically, is not necessary to
recognize a decentering or weakening of the human will.
Pickerings [13] theorization of material agency as mani-
festing in the accommodations and resistances that are
temporally emergent in response to human action, for
instance, more than sufces for that purpose. As Suchman
([12, p. 269]) suggests of her own analysis, persons and
artifacts do not constitute each other in the same way. For
the cases under consideration, Ihdes [19] concept of tech-
nological intentionality is more prudent. It is not that
technologies have intentions but that they exhibit a certain
directionality with respect to reality. Second, ANT may help
some scholars map out networks or assemblages of human
and non-human actants and reach an explanation of some
social action without having to appeal to social forces or
enduring structure, but it is unclear if it has anything to
contribute to the understanding of human decision-
making. Viewing humanmaterial interactions as interest
negotiations may be appropriate for certain styles of
sociological explanation. However, it arguably lacks
psychological depth. ANT black boxes the actors within
the network; they are cognitively shallow and disem-
bodied. Since this work is concerned primarily with the
affective and cognitive aspects of human choice as it
emerges within certain technological contexts, a human-
centered performative theory is more appropriate.
Returning to the matter at hand, consider the example
of the Internet enabled computer. It is generally taken for
granted that modern computers unambiguously enhance
the human will. Compared with other technologies, they
are quite exible and diverse in their potential uses. The
computer user is often portrayed as increasingly liberated
from the constraints of time and space, the computer
promising to allow them to come closer to being able to
author a more desirable version of their life in cyberspace
or simply work more efciently. They can choose between
a greater variety of goods, information sources and
personal relationships. However, such optimistic rhetoric
hides the actions and decisions made more difcult by
a seemingly endless proliferation of individual choice that
computers seem to afford. Many computer users, the
author included, are frustrated by the ease to which they
become distracted by the Internet and how this distraction
impacts their lives. A recently developed computer
program ironically named Freedom promises to help
users reassert their agential mastery over their computers
by blocking Wi-Fi access until the computer is rebooted. In
light of the apparent popularity of this program, the
Internet enabled computer may not be an unambiguous
godsend to human agency. Rather, it appears that the
human will is often too weak in the face of easy access to
a wealth of entertaining information; the affordances of
Internet browsing have an affective and seductive pull
toward distraction. Erecting a small but non-trivial barrier
can diminish the salience of this affective dimension to
a sufcient degree that those who want to avoid shirking
can pursue their work undistracted. The script of the
personal computer is altered by changing the design of its
accomodations and resistances.
This situation is not surprising given the growing body
of experimental studies that highlight the ease to which
ones thinking and behavior can be nudged by mundane
objects in ones environment to borrow Thaler and Sun-
steins term [20]. Having a warm drink in a persons hands
encourages them to see other people as having warm
personalities and act more generously [21]. Attaching
a resume to a heavy clipboard makes it more likely for
a candidate to seem qualied [22]. Changing organ dona-
tion forms to have a check mark to opt-out rather than opt-
in leads to skyrocketing organ donation rates [23], sug-
gesting that many simply do what is cognitively easier
when faced with a complex, uncertain or otherwise chal-
lenging decision about the future. Similarly, Nicholas Carr
has provocatively [24,25] asked Is Google making us
stupid? in arguing that the context of the Internet
decreases ones ability for careful and deep thought. His
work appears to be partially conrmed by research [26]
suggesting that chronic media multitaskers perform
worse than non-multitaskers on certain cognitive tasks,
even including multitasking itself. So, it is clear that arti-
facts have a demonstrable inuence on human thinking
and decision-making; they have some agency.
Recognition of the agency of technology on human
decision making should evoke signicant concerns about
how liberal philosophy typically approaches the good life.
To start, if ones choices and behaviors are not totally ones
own then the basis of the viewthat the good life is, ought to
be or even can be constructed out of autonomous, indi-
vidual choices becomes increasingly questionable. Yet,
taking apart this view will require more elaboration.
3. Technological liberalism and the good life
In the contemporary moral and political climate, the
good life may carry undesirable connotations of tradi-
tionalism and parochialism. Yet, it has roots in philosoph-
ical thinking, at least since Aristotles concept of
eudaimonia. Furthermore, it has gained acceptance as an
object of scientic inquiry in elds like positive psychology.
At the same time, it can be argued that visions of the good
life more substantively ground most political debate and
daily living than abstract philosophical principles. Yet, the
widespread embrace of a morally minimalist philosophical
liberalism eliminates the question of the good life from
open consideration in public discourse; it is assumed that
the good life is solely the responsibility of individuals to
compose and pursue.
Within the framework of many contemporary schools of
philosophical liberalism, society and government are rele-
gated to the role of merely providing a procedurally neutral
context for individual choice. However, one may reasonably
wonder if such a neutral space has yet to be found outside
of the minds of philosophers and libertarians, if it is more
an ideal than reality. Sandel [27] argues that part of the
philosophical support for such procedural neutrality is
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 328
problematically rooted in the concept of the unencum-
bered self and the assertion that the right can be dened
prior to the notion of the good. Sandel attacks both the
possibility for and the desirability of a self able to remain
detached or aloof from any tie that threatens to be consti-
tutive. Such aloofness is a necessity if one is to have the
requisite detached rationality that permits the autonomous
choosing of ones own attachments. He views the hypo-
thetical unencumbered self as forever lurching between
detachment and entanglement, thus without moral depth.
What makes ones constitutive ties family, community,
friends meaningful and valuable for the good life is the
very fact that they are not simply chosen in the way one
might chose a tube of toothpaste in a supermarket, and
they cannot be easily detached without damage to the self.
However, the enhanced mobility and widening array of
consumer choices enabled by technological modernity
seems to promise to make such a detached selfhood more
of a reality. The appeal of many technologies lies in
appearing to increasingly enable the individual to tran-
scend their previous material, social and technological
constraints. As such, the paradigm of technological liber-
alism is premised on the idea that a non-distorting exten-
sion of the individual freedomto choose is possible through
technology and that such extensions ultimately lead to
users making better choices toward a more meaningful,
liberating and satisfying life.
Technological liberalism is obviously pervasive in
modern advertising, which promises better decision-
making and consumer power through the purchase of
any number of gadgets. More surprising is its presence in
scholarship. Wellman [28,29], for instance, has focused
much of his work on attempting to answer the community
question: the concern that modernity has caused a decline
in traditional communal relationships. His answer to that
question is as much semantic as empirical; he redenes
community as an ego-centric network of social support. In
viewing community as centered around individuals who
act as unencumbered entrepreneurial operators of
networks and build up personal portfolios of specialized
ties, Wellman seems to view communities as having been
liberated by technological modernity from a basis in
ostensibly outmoded ideas such as local, place-based soli-
darity or mutual obligation. Not surprisingly, his theories
are most often put to use in studies of online social
interaction.
Arguably, there is no longer even a question concerning
community to answer if one reconceptualizes the trans-
formation of community to an increasingly egocentric and
personalized construct not as a potentially problematic
cultural pathology but as progress. While Wellman ([30, p.
248]) declares somewhat triumphantly that this is the
time for individuals and their networks, not for groups,
many may not share his viewof unencumbered networked
individualismas a desirable formof life nor appreciate their
relative lack of agency in the matter. The technological
systems that enable the practices of networked individu-
alism could be argued to serve as radical monopolies
against practicing thicker notions of community; as
institutions and infrastructures are increasingly modeled
on networks, alternative communal arrangements may
become prohibitively difcult. Again, to be clear, the criti-
cism being leveled against Wellman here is not against his
empirical observations of the affordances of modern tech-
nological society for affording an increase in the individ-
uals ability to remain more aloof to ones social ties, but
that he seems to present the emergence of an egoistic form
of community as an ultimately desirable expansion of
freedom.
The intimate relationship between modern technology
and liberal politics has been critiqued at length by George
Grant ([31, p. 129]), who argued that modern liberalism
generally serves to legitimate technological society. Insofar
as liberalism holds paramount the individuals ability to
author their own existence and modern technology
appears to already and increasingly enable this ability
suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two. That is,
liberalismis both seen as justied by and used to justify the
technological context of modernity. One ends up in
a circular argument where it appears that the human
condition cannot reasonably be otherwise but is fortu-
nately in line with the march of progress of a set of liberal
desiderata premised on promoting a more unencumbered
individual selfhood; it ought to be because it already and
increasingly is. As Darin Barney ([32, p. 51]) puts it, To
the extent that technological liberalism purports to be free
of the specication of the good, it is a politics in denial.
Technological liberalisms most extreme manifestation is
that of the Californian Ideology, described by Barbook
and Cameron [33] as a mix of triumphant technological
determinism and individualistic libertarianism that has
emerged in magazines like Wired and the writings of
Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others with the advent of
the Internet.
4. Technology and choice making
The question concerning technology and the good life,
however, is not only a philosophical and normative ques-
tion but also an empirical one. Not only should one be
willing to examine the philosophical assumptions founding
technological liberalism and its effects on human meaning,
but also ask if it reects reality. To be clear, the focus here is
on a thick notion of choice-making, one that is more
substantial than trivial forms of consumer choice, such as
those made in drug stores between avors of mouthwash.
That is, what matters most is the ability of people to make
choices about howthey ought to live or howeasily they can
put their values into action. By highlighting how physical
reality often nudges decision-making, the above
mentioned research suggests that ones choices are often
not completely open to individual formulation but emerge,
in part, from the more proximate context. As social
psychological research has suggested for many years [34],
human decisions are generally local and emotional rather
than detached and rational. As performative theorists
argue, it is situated. The process of decision-making is well
illustrated by Jonathan Haidt [35], who describes the
limitations of the human will through the metaphor of
a rider on an elephant. The rational part of the self is the
rider, who can only imperfectly direct the path of the sub-
rational and emotional elephant.
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 329
In spite of the promise of modern technology, the
technologically-enabled, unencumbered self may be more
myth than reality. Again, recall the program called
Freedom. There is no logical reason for such a program to
exist if technologies like the Internet simply extended the
human rational will. While it may enable access to
a diversity of sources of information, it may also frustrate
attempts to put those sources to use in practices that many
would consider to be more valuable than the pursuit of
entertainment.
Innocuous and seemingly liberating technologies often
shape the way one lives, not always for the better. Consider
the effects that cell phones have had on daily living. They
no doubt afford new freedoms of communication and
informational access. However, many may feel increasingly
tethered to and dependent on them. The author, for
instance, nds himself more easily distracted and more
often attempting to multitask because of the mistaken
belief that it will give him more time or because of an
increased intolerance to waiting or boredom. He is less
likely to venture a risky conversation with a stranger in
public. If he is lonely, the author most often contacts one of
his already existing ties for a much safer interaction. This
is not an arrangement he has rationally chosen. In this
instance, the fearful elephant is clearly leading its rider.
Furthermore, in light of observational ndings [36]
showing that mobile phone users are much less likely to
engage in serendipitous public interaction than people
occupied with a book or even a laptop, it appears that such
an experience is not unique to the author.
Consider a similar situation, likely familiar to those with
children. Sitting kids in front of media devices such as
television can provide a well needed respite for over-
worked and stressed parents who want to relax or
accomplish household chores without distraction [37,38].
This is no doubt convenient and pleasing, but many of the
parents doing so would likely agree that this practice does
not exactly constitute good parenting much less
contribute to the production of well adjusted children.
However, some may justify this behavior in light of the
ostensible educative benets of the content and the epis-
temological uncertainty concerning the possible develop-
mental damage of too much screen time. Nevertheless,
those who would argue that the decision between the two
alternatives, sitting ones children in front of a media device
and directing ones children into more active and engaged
practices, is one that can be done easily and rationally
probably have neither spent an evening around rambunc-
tious young children after a bad day at work nor considered
medias affective pull on children and parents needing
a break.
The choice that many people would see as the better
option that is, not using media as a babysitter or pacier
is often more difcult and probably not made nearly
often enough; the observation [39] that children less than
seven average somewhere between two to 4 h of media
exposure each day in the United States, while the average
skyrockets to around seven or 8 h each day for eight to
eighteen year olds, attests to this. As well, survey results
show that approximately half of parents with tablets or
smart phones use them to distract their kids while in the
car or at restaurants [40]. Such statistics may reect the
ease and allure of simply turning on the television, or
some other device, to keep children occupied. However, it
is clearly also confounded by the relative difculty of
alternatives if one lives in a suburban neighborhood with
little else to occupy children as well as the degree to which
parents are too mentally and physically drained perhaps
working long hours or several jobs just to stay nancially
aoat to nd other activities to engage their children.
Indeed, the occurrence of levels of television viewing that
exceeds American Academy of Pediatric guidelines is
correlated with factors associated with low socio-
economic status: poor neighborhoods, low levels of
education and race [41]. Plopping the kids in front of
a screen may not match the values of many parents, yet
the circumstances likely frustrate many attempts to put
those values into action.
Admittedly, limitations on choice are likely as much
socioeconomic as psychological and technological. Power
[42] has argued that the modern capitalist economy is like
a technological device the design of which keeps people
trapped into patterns of consumption. My argument
concerning technology, however, is parallel in form to
rather than stemming directly from such critiques of the
market. Neoliberals tend to see markets as neutral and
objective means of distributing goods that straightfor-
wardly expands human agency, enabling them to more
freely pursue their own happiness. People, via markets, are
seen as more free to choose to borrow the title of one of
Milton Friedmans books. Arguably, that perspective is
increasingly shortsighted. Not only do markets generally
only provide a trivialized version of choice one primarily
decides between competing commodities but, as Power
argues, it brackets out the socially constructed nature of
markets and ignores the non-neutral role markets play in
constructing new kinds of chronically dissatised (non)
citizens. Traditional capitalist economics takes for granted
the homo economicus model of human behavior, assuming
that the market choices made by consumers are an undis-
torted window into their values and utilities. Psychological
experiments, however, suggest that market structures
produce very different habits of behavior than those
produced by social and moral norms. For instance, asking
late parents to pay a fee when picking up their children
fromday care encourages further tardiness because parents
come to see their lateness as a purchasable service rather
than a moral failing [43]. One study suggests that simply
getting people to think about money tends to evoke
isolating and self interested behavior [44]. The argument
thus far has been that such contextual non-neutrality
extends far beyond markets to technologies themselves;
technological contexts can as easily trap people in
patterns of behavior as markets do.
This assertion, of course, raises the question: If human
choice-making suffers these signicant limitations, why is
it that technological liberalism remains so tenacious? An
answer may lie in considering how the experience of many
modern technologies potentially provides the scaffolding
for a particular way of understanding ones place within the
world. The way in which technologies-of-choice reveal the
world may help to instill the belief that people can and
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 330
should exist apart from a reality that serves mainly as
a resource with which they author their own lives. This
belief frames choice as an imposing of ones will on the
world rather than a working with or through reality.
However, it is not that people are actually no longer
interdependent or are really sufciently empowered to
impose their will so directly and arbitrarily, but rather that
the feeling that ones own capacities have been extended
can effectively prevent themfromnoticing, experiencing or
practicing interdependence. The user of a technology
remains perennially reliant on large-scale or global
networks, dependent on the continued proper functioning
of devices and subjected to the disciplining characteristics
of the technology itself. Yet, the ability to choose between
a diversity of commodities or dial in custom settings on
a gadget feels empowering. Within the phenomenological
experience of using many technologies, larger dependen-
cies remain cognitively distant, toward the limit of human
comprehensibility and attention, but the act of choosing
however trivial remains cognitively near. Stated another
way, devices do not produce unencumbered selves as an
unquestionable reality but rather help to reproduce the
belief that one is an unencumbered choosing self through
the practices they enable and the aspects of being their use
obscures. They materialize a version of moral decision-
making: the unencumbered liberal self.
The ability to maintain a belief that one can steer ones
own life against a harsh reality that otherwise would not
submit to ones will but command ones respect may be
part of the allure of technologies that only marginally
expand ones options among a range of commodities but
otherwise do little to support the ability to choose an
alternate means of living. Indeed, psychologists suggest
that feelings of control, even if illusory, contribute to
mental well-being [45,46]. Though, others suggest that the
substantial emphasis given to individual choice for well-
being is a social construction particular to mainly
educated westerners and that too much choice can be
detrimental [47]. Nevertheless, in many areas of life, the
dominant concept of choosing has become so thin that it is
taken to mean the ability to pick among a number of
market provided options rather than anything more
substantive. Consider popular arguments to the effect that
subsidy of public television is no longer necessary in
a world with hundreds of cable and satellite channels. Such
arguments are founded on the assumption that there is
nothing more to television than providing fragmented
demographic targets and lifestyle enclaves with the
entertainment they most prefer to receive, bracketing out
any consideration of whether or not the ability to choose
programming undergirded by a broader concern for the
public interest or the development of citizenship matters.
Simply, insofar as technologies provide a range of
commodious but too often trivial options they may impart
the illusion of control and conceal the choices and practices
made more difcult or impossible by the embrace of those
technologies.
So far, technological liberalism has been characterized
and found wanting. Many modern technologies are not the
non-distorting extenders of individual human agency that
technological liberalism purports them to be. A seemingly
liberating technological context can often be a barrier to
putting some set of values into action rather than a helping
hand. This suggests two ways forward. First, scholars could
study how technologies could actually enable more
reexive decisions and thus the ability to more easily put
ones values into action. Second, technologies could be
discussed, designed and deployed in more open acknowl-
edgment of their implications for the good life. The latter
half of this work will attempt to address mainly the second
option by building upon the philosophy of Albert Borg-
mann. His concept of a focal practice provides an alterna-
tive to technological liberalism. While alternative pathways
do exist, the practice of appropriation is argued to be
insufcient to help most people to be able pursue those
alternatives; one must adequately consider the extent to
which alternative technologies can conict with both
entrenched liberal alternatives as well as many aspects of
the present economic system.
5. Focal technologies and the good life
Albert Borgmann [3] has argued for a division of tech-
nology between what he calls technological devices and
focal things. What separates these types of technologies
is how they reveal the product they provide and the kinds
of practices they tend to engender. Borgmann takes
modern central heating to be exemplary of technological
devices. It provides warmth in a way that is convenient,
pleasant and on-demand. However, it conceals from the
user the means by which heat is produced and makes little
demands on the user to engage with it or other people.
Central heating renders warmth as a commodity, an end
unencumbered by its means. In contrast, the traditional
hearth or wood stove represents focal things. To provide
warmth, the wood stove demands the skill and attention of
its user, engages themin the local environment through the
collection of fuel and serves as a social focus for the
household. In this case the user is active and engaged in the
production of heat and the design of the technology
encourages engagement with other people in the home.
Central heating may keep one equally cozy everywhere in
a building but does not help one to remainphysically active,
mentally engaged and in the company of others as a wood
stove tends to do. As well, in light of the psychological
research that suggests an unconscious linking of physical
and interpersonal warmth, it would seem that the bringing
together of bodies enacted by the wood stove is as affective
as it is spatial.
Borgmanns work suggests that technological devices
and focal things have the agency to direct the user into
different kinds of practices and patterns of living. As such, it
is compatible with a performative understanding of
materiality. His philosophy is a rejection of technological
instrumentalism, the idea that technologies can be neutral
instruments. Rather, they are means that shape their ends.
The appeal of technological devices is the promise of the
better life through personal liberation from material, bio-
logical and social constraints; devices, as technologies-of-
choice appear to provide that mythic neutral context and
extension of the will necessary for the unencumbered
pursuit of happiness. That is, the good life via the device
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 331
paradigm is seen to occur only when the individual is
freed from any potentially burdensome external constraint
on choice.
Borgmann, on the other hand, can be read as seeing the
good and meaningful life as not lying in the technological
casting off of every possible inconvenience of daily living
but based in striving to become someone better able to rise
to the challenge of many of those inconveniences. The focal
practices demanded by Borgmann's focal things are valu-
able because they help shape people better able to deeply
engage with the world around them. That is, focal things, as
technologies-of-commitment, do not offer anything resem-
bling consumer choice or a pathway to unencumbered
selfhood but rather the opportunity to develop and exercise
ones phronetic judgment. Focal users nd fulllment in
practices inwhichthings and their worldmay demand to be
recognized and respected as a reality that remains stub-
bornly out of reach of their more arbitrary whims and
desires for control. Practices, though burdensome, are often
deeplysatisfying intheir ownright. MatthewCrawford[48],
for instance, has eloquently described the personal satis-
faction brought by such engagement in the context of craft
work.
At any rate, discussions of wood stoves may be too far
removed from most peoples experiences when compared
to something like the Internet. By Borgmanns classica-
tion, Internet communication technologies would appear
to be devices rather than focal things. While one may
appropriate the Internet for a committed focal practice,
such as when a couple uses video chat to maintain an
intimate but geographically distant relationship, the
Internet provides little substantive support for such prac-
tices. Similarly, recall howcentral heating may better afford
social dispersion than gathering within a house but does
not prohibit gathering outright. Rather, as argued by
Manuel Castells [49], the Internet appears as material
support for the practice of networked individualism. A
practice characterized by people acting like entrepreneurs,
shopping around [50] in a market of social ties. This
practice appears predicated on the treating of others and
social presence as a commodity; the feeling of social
connection becomes a good obtained similarly to warmth
in centrally heated home simply turned on or off at will.
The idea that networked individualism is essentially liber-
ating would have to be motivated by the view that tradi-
tional social ties are unnecessarily burdensome or
constraining, similar to contending with a nicky wood
stove. Such a mindset would seem to assume from the
outset that the feeling of possessing choice about ones ties
is ultimately more valuable than their experiential depth.
Yet, the extent to which the practice of networked indi-
vidualism is enabled, such a selfhood may more easily
become taken-for-granted and naturalized. If ones beliefs
about the nature of sociality are scaffolded by ones
performative engagement with social worlds, then it is
reasonable to suggest that newaffordances for socializing
which emphasize frictionless and relatively weak and
diffuse ties can and will shift views of the self and social
norms.
However, the above argument is not merely specula-
tive. Decades of observation of peoples interactions over
networked communication technologies by Turkle ([51,
p. 15]) suggest that such technologies do affect how
people interact and think about sociality. She argues that
modern communication technologies permit users to act
like modern day Goldilockses, able to increasingly titrate
their commitments and interactions to just the desired
amounts. Yet, she nds this new power not unquestion-
ably enabling. These technologies permit the erecting of
electronic barriers to social intimacy as much as the
attempt to bridge physical distances. Turkle views this
tendency to increasingly pursue and demand frictionless
relationships with controllable levels of intimacy as
coming at the cost of increased anxiety and new forms of
solitude.
Technology, as Turkle argues ([51, p. 1]), is highly
seductive when what it offers to meet our human vulner-
abilities. Too often, modern communication devices may
end up being more enabling of peoples worst and most
irrational proclivities than their best, affording their fearful
ight from potentially threatening levels of commitment
and intimacy. The ostensible increase in agency, at the
same time, is highly alluring. It would seem odd to argue
that the isolation and anxiety suffered by Turkles inter-
locutors are freely chosen, a result of what they have
rationally decided to be constitutive of the good life.
Rather, given the performative nature of choice-making,
they may simply be people who are enabled by tech-
nology to be increasingly governed by their fears and
impulses in the pursuit of independence, even if they may
feel that they have been empowered in other ways. Social
intimacy may be like the essay or book many people
struggle to focus on when on their computers, hindered
more than helped by all the affordances and new abilities
enabled by the technology.
What Ray Oldenberg [52] called third spaces would
appear to be the focal opposite of such devices. Built spaces
such as coffee shops and the local tavern do more than
simply satiate the individual desire for social support; they
promote the focal skilled practice and habit of public
socializing. However, functional third spaces are in decline;
a commons tragedy wrought in part by the virtual penning
in of public social spaces. Think of the scene of digital
cocooning in a typical Starbucks. Though gaining the ability
to have loved ones or entertainment always available, the
allure of wrapping oneself within a web of safe and
technologically mediated ties may lead to a declining
vibrancy of public interaction. Of course, some may see
online spaces as potentially providing something similar to
a third space. However, the voluntarism and disem-
bodiedness of online spaces suggests that, while they do
enable social interaction, they are different in kind; part of
what dened the character of the local tavern was that it
was the local tavern as well as situated in a community that
was at once social and material. As well, those arguments
fail to recognize that, due to the erecting of virtual barriers
to physical public socializing, this development is not
simply an expansion of choice. Rather, it can be viewed as
another of Illichs radical monopolies. The choice is
between adapting to the new context or facing social
isolation rather than between two equally vibrant
alternatives.
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 332
6. Underdetermination of technology and the limits
of appropriation
However, the agency of technologies in shaping human
decision-making is not absolute. Indeed, one of the main
ndings of STS research is that technologies are under-
determined by their technical components; they are socially
constructed. For example, it would be imprudent to think
that focal practices are absolutely impossible with devices.
As Diane Michelfelder [53] has pointed out, telephones
for example are often used as means to support focal
practices like care-giving. However, why it is that some
groups succeed in using a particular device more focally
while others use it primarily to obtain goods as unen-
cumbered commodities, merits investigation. There may be
some countervailing contextual agency, empowerment or
still present sociocultural norm at work that strengthens
the individual or collective capacity to make such a choice.
Nevertheless, a fruitful comparison could be made between
devices/things and the opt-in/opt-out systems for organ
donation mentioned above. Focal practices may be some-
thing one must opt into when using devices while focal
things alternatively arrange the decision as an opt-out.
With devices, non-engagement may be the default option
taken by many if not most users because it is cognitively
easier, regardless of what they may prefer upon reection.
Nevertheless, technologies are often appropriated for
newuses. The argument here is not that they are absolutely
determinative or inexible. Rather, appropriation is
frequently too weak of a response because it may require
enough extra effort or expertise that too many people do
not bother to make an attempt. The inuence of a tech-
nology on human behavior need not be absolute to be
effective. Furthermore, the ability to appropriate is strongly
contingent or serendipitous itself. Whether one is turning
a vintage automobile into a low rider or hacking the
French Minitel into an electronic singles bar, appropriation
often requires resources available to only an elite minority
of users. This is especially true as devices become increas-
ingly complex, opaque and sealed shut by rivets or epoxy.
Often, one must already be empowered in some relevant
way in order to appropriate. As far as the majority of the
public is concerned, the top-down relationship remains
unchanged in moving from consumer products to tech-
nologies appropriated by some ostensibly subaltern
contingent of experts. For example, social networking
technology is often credited with increasing grass roots
political power at the bottom of the hierarchy. Yet, such an
argument may hold true only if the bottom is seen as
existing in the educated middle class. The poll tax for this
newform of political power consists of the means to obtain
a computer and Internet access as well as the time to learn
to use the programs, including potentially ever higher
levels expertise programming skills if the users them-
selves are to have a more substantive level of control over
the technology.
Furthermore, one must not confuse the part with the
whole that is, the appropriation with the device. Such
a move may motivate a great deal more techno-optimism
than is merited. The fact that Freedom can help people
focus on their given task when working on computers does
not immediately mean that computers help people to
focus; they generally do not. The urge to generalize from
minority uses may be similarly misleading. For instance,
Feenberg ([54, p. 192]) lists the example of an online
support group for those with a chronic disease as demon-
strating the potential of the Internet for interpersonal
engagement. Of course, such forums are good things but
they are at odds with much of the social behavior else-
where online. An activity that comprises an innitesimally
small percentage of online happenings does not immedi-
ately justify the form of the technology in which it
currently exists. One can imagine alternative Internets,
which better support engagement with local communities
and the kind of relating that takes place on such forums
while being far less enabling of the aimless distraction,
misinformation, antisocial behavior and hedonistic
consumption that is predominant. Nevertheless, such
alternatives have yet to materialize.
Of course, scholars like Feenberg [54] view technolog-
ical appropriations as suggestive of the potential for the
deep democratization of technology. Most, the author
included, would rightly view technology assessment or
participatory design as laudable ideas and ultimately
desirable especially when compared to contemporary
technocracy. Furthermore, Feenbergs vision of the good
life as something more than merely the ability obtain
more goods in the prevailing socioeconomic system (p.
225) is quite similar to Borgmannian conception. Never-
theless, the practical agency of most citizens in regards to
their technologies has yet to catch up to its theoretical
potential. While there are fruitful alternatives currently in
practice on a small-scale as well as on the horizon, there are
signicant barriers to their implementation that ought to
be taken more seriously.
7. Alternatives and barriers
The purpose of this essay has been neither to maintain
a simple nostalgia for some idealized past that pre-dates
the technological device nor to argue that all devices
ought be eliminated. As well, there are likely some tech-
nologies that the above perspective does not distinguish
between. For instance, the difference between an auto-
matic and a manual transmission in a car is likely negligible
for the good life, though the automobile itself is ripe for
critique. Nevertheless, since most people do not yet have
much say over which technologies make up the context of
daily life and often struggle to put their values into action
within those contexts, technological devices already act as
legislations on the good life; devices are radical monopo-
lies, scripts and affective technologies that can crowd out
focal practices. Yet, the paradigm of technological liber-
alism dominates. Rather than designing under the
assumption that the good life lies in increasingly permit-
ting individuals to detach from their local physical and
social ecologies, in order to enable consumer-like choices,
why not design technologies that can enable people to
more thoughtfully act within and commit to those
ecologies?
An example of just such a progressive focal technology
is described by Pollan [55]. Joel Salatin, the owner of
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 333
Polyface Farms, has developed the means to practice a kind
of focal farming. Rather than dousing his elds in chemicals
or embracing monoculture, Salatin farms according to
a sophisticated and empirically based understanding of the
ecology where he is situated and a feeling for the animals
he raises; they are not seen as mere inputs to an industrial
process. He does not simply eschew technology but rather
invents and implements new kinds of technology, such as
mobile hen houses and portable electric fences. Salatin
strives for a standard of good farming different than that
of narrow industrial efciency. His work is based on exer-
cising phronetic judgment in working with the natural
tendencies of the plants and animals on his farm rather
than aiming to assert his technological mastery over them.
The characteristics of the farm demand that he work
cooperatively with other beings instead of commanding an
army of devices. Though his work is more mentally and
physically taxing, the technological context of his farm
promotes practices of committed engagement with the
environment, the animals, his family and the local
community, better conforming to the Borgmannian notion
of the good life than typical industrial farm practices.
Admittedly, it is not only the Borgmannian good life that
this case exemplies. Borgmann shares with Franklin [56]
and Pacey [2] a practice based conception of technology.
Franklin would likely classify Salatins farming as
a holistic technology rather than a prescriptive one
because of how its craft-like character contrasts from the
narrow, divided and rigid demands of a modern industrial
process. The example also reects Paceys distinction
between people-centered and object-centered tech-
nologies. A people-centered approach considers the
connections between the person building the technology
and the people who benet from or use it as well as the
environmental impact, highlighting the importance of
moving beyond a narrow and strict compartmentalization
of technical and ethical thinking. Pacey also distinguishes
between the modes of decision making afforded by
different technological regimes that parallels the distinc-
tion made herein between making choices and exercising
judgment. He frames the issue as the decision between
either imposing our own purposes without any compro-
mise, or of understanding and working along with natures
own purposiveness (p. 145).
However, there are signicant economic barriers to the
wider embrace of more focal technologies and their prac-
tices. In the move between a wood stove and central
heating, focal externalities become served by their own
highly protable and highly specialized devices: outdoor
physical exertion is replaced by a Bowex or gym
membership, the social gathering of the hearth is
substituted by a television or computer, mental stimulation
of a focal practice is found through video games or elec-
tronic puzzles and so on. Some may not even have this
much, opting for blood pressure and diabetes medicines as
well as trips to the family therapist and recreational drug
use in order to adapt physically and mentally with modern
living. It is a situation justied by an increased measure of
economic activity, a narrow denition of efciency and
the ostensible increase of choice resulting from the isola-
tion and specialization of formerly interdependent
activities. This is similar to the case in farming where
a more industrially efcient monoculture entails pesticides,
articial fertilizers, mechanical planting and harvesting as
well as innumerable other capital investments that argu-
ably serve corporate bottom lines and add to the national
GDP more than they may serve the interests of farmers,
consumer health or the environment. Thus, the same
characteristics of western economics which may cause
non-market goods such as well-functioning ecosystems,
clean water supplies and healthy food to be undervalued or
bracketed out entirely would also seem to be at work for
goods such as healthy bodies, engaging labor and cohesive
households. That is, people getting their exercise, mental
stimulation and social support outside of or as an exter-
nality of market products is viewed as an economic loss
even if it is a humanistic gain. Similarly, Salatins utilization
of the wastes produced on his farm as a replacement for
commercial fertilizer can also be measured as an economic
loss, though it is an ecological gain.
It seems that moving to a good life not dominated by the
pattern of technological devices will depend on the
embrace of a more humanistic and ecological kind of
economics that values intangibles like communal and
ecological solidarity, things not easily commodied. To
borrow Borgmanns ([3, p. 223]) vocabulary, modern
economics more easily measures the afuence of
consumption brought by devices than the wealth of
engagement enabled by focal things. A wealth focused
economics would see the value in a traditional or New
Urbanist style neighborhood over suburban sprawl, of
extended families or communities living close to each
other, of skilled craft labor and of environmental engage-
ment for human ourishing. The issue with technological
devices may be that they simply reect and reinforce the
economic system they come from, a problem compounded
by the fact that much modern public policy such as
industrial farm subsidy supports the continued deploy-
ment of devices in spite of their pathological consequences.
Jesse Tatums [5,57] examination of the Home Power
movement, another case of how technologies could
potentially better afford focal practices and alternative
values, illustrates other barriers and problematics. First,
while Home Power may work for those able to study and
purchase the requisite technology as well as move out to
rural areas where small-scale wind or water turbines can
be erected, it is not an option for most of the population.
Without other signicant changes, one ends up back at the
same problem faced by technological appropriation. As
Power ([42, p. 292]) argues, substantive technological
reformwould likely require the restructuring of institutions
so that embracing focal things and practices is more
straightforward and affordable for most people, not just the
heroic and the saintly. Second, efforts to get off-the-grid
of modernity may very easily become imbued with a desire
for a problematic kind of rugged individualism. Avenues of
reform often risk being co-opted by the same mentality of
technological liberalism, even if they enable greater
engagement with the world of things.
Yet another barrier is recognizable in the degree of
incommensurability between liberal and more communi-
tarian forms of technology. The former may actively
T. Dotson / Technology in Society 34 (2012) 326336 334
undermine the latter, while the latter may be seen as
oppressive by supporters of the former. This is apparent in
heated public debates when the possibilities for pedestrian
zones, bike lanes or public transit are explored, which could
result in a slight negative impact on automobile trafc. Yet,
the recognition that every technological context enables
only a particular range of good lives can open up space for
better public policy and the possibility of genuinely prac-
ticing technological pluralism as a society. Clearly, there
remains much to be done to begin outlining how technol-
ogies more compatible with focal practices can be practi-
cally developed and deployed in an equitable and pro-
social manner.
8. Conclusion
The recognition of the performative aspects of tech-
nology in relation to human choice-making supports the
view that technologies are non-neutral with respect to
human strivings toward the good life. Technologies do not
simply enhance ones volition, as is assumed in the para-
digm of technological liberalism, but rather generally
support only some conceptions of human ourishing.
Technologies-of-choice Borgmanns devices constitute
a cognitive ecology that, ironically, often frustrates
attempts to put certain visions of the good life into action at
the same time that they promise to extend the human will.
Rather than primarily designing according to the techno-
logical liberalist vision of the good life and helping to
sustain the arguably illusory belief that one can become an
unencumbered self who makes free choices, why cannot
societies develop technologies better compatible with focal
and communitarian practices, along with the development
of practical judgment? Movements such as Slow Food, DIY,
critical making, Home Power, organic farming, participa-
tory design, technology assessment and calls for changed
living arrangement like a 21 h work week [58] are all
already aimed at increasingly enabling kinds of good lives
premised on something other than technological liber-
alism. Yet, they remain at the margins and are not only in
need of good arguments in their favor but also efforts
directed toward diminishing the barriers that prevent their
wider and more efcacious implementations.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Edward J. Woodhouse
for providing guidance in preparing this manuscript.
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