Technological

Determinism:
Does it Work?
A NT H ONY RE A D

"It can be said that what has altered our world is not television or radio or printing as such, but the uses
made of them, in particular societies." (Williams 1989: 172)
Technological determinism: the mindset of believing that technological inventions alter our humanity and
world of its own accord. Chandler defines the theory as such: “technology is seen as the ‘prime mover’ in
history” (2000). Indeed, Williams asks us to reminisce on how often people have said that printing,
television or radio has altered the world (1989). But to properly discuss this theory, we must first define
the term ‘technology’.

Technology vs. Technological Invention

A technology is vastly different from a technological invention. Williams guides us through the three-step
formation of a technology. Firstly, the technique, the “skill or application of a skill”, must be developed.
Secondly, the technique is applied to create the technical invention, which is the “development of such a
skill or invention of one of its devices”. After all this, the technology is created, which is how the technical
invention is appropriated into society and utilised (1989: 173). This is the polar opposite of technological
determinism, as the technology defined here does not define us. Rather, we define it and its uses. This
definition, when applied to printing, suddenly has a massive impact across many fields, including ideas of
time, nationality and authorship among others.

Marshall McLuhan, author of the influential text The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), is a classic technological
determinist at heart. Throughout his work, he develops an ideal, romanticised humanity where
technological inventions directly impact the changing landscape of society. In particular, he laments this
idea in the context of medieval times, where printing atomised society, broke down religion and
thoroughly disrupted the ‘Order of Things’. He also asserts printing introduced a new sense of
nationalism (and therefore warfare) and enslavement to the new Author. He even paraphrases The
Bridge on the River Kwai to illustrate his point: “The English Colonel has it all diagrammed and segmented
in no time. Of course, he has no end in view. His technology is his way of life” (1962: 165).

McLuhan’s argument is further illustrated in his chapter headings, such as, “Typography tended to alter
language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity” (1962: 161),
“Print…created the uniform, centralising forces of modern nationalism” (1962: 199) and “Scribal culture
could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography” (1962: 130). Even without
reading the ensuing articles, one can see a hard-headed approach to typography here. He takes no
prisoners in arguing that printing ruined medieval culture. What is particularly interesting in McLuhan’s
approach to this theory is the way in which he composes his own book. The Gutenberg Galaxy is very
different from other academic texts in that it appears to be a mash-up of many different sources into one
compendium. Does this idea not resonate with the Medieval use of the word ‘author’? McLuhan himself
says that “authorship before print was in a large degree the building of a mosaic” (1962: 132), and this is
clearly commemorated in the composing of his own volume. Even the way the pages are set out is
comparable to a scrapbook of notes taken from different ‘authors’. Through his own mode of writing,
McLuhan successfully demonstrates his idea of pre-print culture and the lamentable loss of it.

Eisenstein and the Argument against Technological Determinism

While McLuhan has an overly romanticised view of Medieval culture and its loss, Elizabeth Eisenstein
takes a far different approach to the invention of the printing press. Instead of asserting that printing was
the sole cause of issues around medieval times, she says that the changes were already underway. The
printing press just helped them along, and was but one of the multiple factors leading to the rise of
science and the Protestant Reformation (1980). Eisenstein takes a positive approach to the creation of
the printing press, reversing everything McLuhan finds wrong with it. Indeed, while McLuhan sees the
‘high’ form of scribal culture toppled by the revolution of the ‘low’ and ‘hot’ printing press, Eisenstein is
the opposite. She sees both forms as equally useful, but printing revolves to the ‘high’ position above the
manuscript (Williams 1983).

Eisenstein sees the printing press as one of the factors in freeing people from the stifling medieval ways
of day-to-day living. For example, the taken-for-granted Feudal political structure was upturned and
replaced by a growing democratic and capitalist nation. The repetitive nature of cyclical time was
replaced by a forward- and backward-looking linear timeframe. These examples are just two of the many
changes to come hand-in-hand with the creation of the printing press. But the biggest difference
between McLuhan and Eisenstein comes with this quote: “It is important to strike the right balance
between the uninformed enthusiasts who assume print changed almost nothing and the scholarly
sceptics who hold it changed everything” (1980: 52). This shows Eisenstein has a greatly balanced view on
the press, and doesn’t fall so easily into the trap of taking sides. However, she does make one concession
which proves she is a fan of printing and its uses: “Printing also aided artists and writers in pursuit of
lasting fame…*they+ could serve the cause of public knowledge…and at the same time serve themselves”
(1980: 56). While this mainly refers to scientific works, printing also helped create the book (the public
display of private thoughts) and the newspaper (the creation of public opinion). By raising the status of
the author and eliminating scribal drift, such as in Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, printing became a capitalist
endeavour.

Print and the Human Mind

To view the printing press as a purely social, political and capitalist endeavour is to ignore the ways in
which it has affected humanity mentally. Hirst and Wooley (1982) do not take sides on whether printing
has completely, or not at all, affected the development of society as a whole. Indeed, they say “the
consequences of writing for social relations tend either to be ignored or to be excessively emphasized
and over-rated” (1982: 31), which sum up the opposing views of McLuhan and, to a lesser extent,
Eisenstein. Where Hirst and Wooley make their point is in the mental development of humanity,
especially printing’s effect on memory. They show how people used to use “the systemisation of
knowledge and training of memory” (1982: 37), referring to mnemic devices used to retain knowledge.
This transferred over into reality, creating the “ordered hierarchies of categories” (1982: 37) seen in the
Feudal system and the Great Chain of Being’. With the advent of print came “mnemic decrement…any
impairment of recall, relearning, recognition or other test of retention” (Super & Young 1941), and this
trend has continued to today, with what Mayer-Schonberger calls “the virtue of forgetting in the digital
age” (2009). With the easy storage of information available to us at virtually any time, forgetting has
become the status quo. Hirst and Wooley posit that this decline originated with the development of the
printing press.

Hirst and Wooley also define the difference between older ‘authorities’ and newer ‘authors’. The
‘authorities’ of pre-print times had their work cut and pasted together by copyists and scholars, which
today would ensue “*sacking+ for plagiarism and incompetence” (1982: 40). Indeed, the older chain of
authority in the written word was set out much like the Great Chain of Being. First came the scribe, who
simply wrote down what the authorities said. Secondly, the compiler, who collated many different ideas
of many different authorities into one volume. Thirdly, the commentator, who passed judgement on
these texts as valid or not (much like the modern reviewer) and added parts of their own. Lastly, on top
of the chain, were the authorities themselves, who were vast wells of knowledge on particular areas of
study. This ‘great chain’, along with the other Great Chain, was disrupted with the advent of printing.
Print “stabilised the text” and assigned “limits to it” (1982: 41). Therefore, the text was given limits and
an actual author, who could claim dominion over it. The new age of the Author was born. However, in
today’s age, postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and in turn creates an air of
pastiche (Firat & Venkatesh 1995). Is this not a return to the old ideas of creating volumes from various
sources, with a changing focus from authorities to the lowly scribes?

Print, Time and the Nation

Apart from this shifting of accent in authorship and memory, printing has also affected the twin
movements of nationality, and more broadly, time. In pre-print times, especially in medieval states, the
concept of time was thought of as cyclical in nature. For example, the seasons were a cyclical concept to
assist in the running of farming practices. This idea of cyclical time is also found in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (2006), where he sees time as an infinite recurring pattern. The Ouroboros dragon is also
used as a symbol for the idea of cyclical time (Sutton 1993). The invention of the printing press shifted
the idea of time from this never-ending cyclical concept to a more stable linear frame (Anderson 1991).
However, cyclical time did not fully disappear; it just merged with linear time to create an forward-
moving spiral.

The idea of linear time finds a home in the novel. Novelists show their readerships what it is like to be of
a certain nation. Anderson uses the example of a Filipino novel to show how the readers are not just
readers, but “we-Filipino-readers”. The novel gives “a hypnotic confirmation of the solidarity of a single
community…moving onward through calendrical time” (1991: 27). Linear time also appears in the form of
national commemorations, such as national holidays and tombs of Unknown Soldiers (1991: 9). The
creation of these commemorative days refers to the past and future simultaneously, again in calendrical
time. Lastly, the newspaper is a most powerful tool of nationalism. Every edition has the date printed on
it, referring simultaneously to the past and future editions of the paper. Mercer calls the paper a strong
“mannering technology”: the tool to which people refer to for their ideas of nationality (1992). These
ideas of time and nationality are not mutually exclusive. As they change, they change together, and the
printing press helped this process along swiftly and surely.

Power and Print

Of all the theorists who take printing into account, Bruno Latour is surely one of the most interesting, and
controversial. In his article Drawing Things Together (1990), Latour takes a scientific approach to studying
the ongoing effects of printing. Several points are made, all of which deserve whole fields of analysis, but
a brief overview will suffice. Latour makes an initial point that not only time is altered by printing, but
also space and perspective. He quotes Ferguson as saying, “The ‘mind’ at last has ‘an eye’” (1990: 28).
The ideas of perspective created in the mind from a two-dimensional image had finally been solidified.
Leading on from this point, the measurement of everything was created, separating the previously
infinite space into ‘parts’. Almost everything now has a measurement (aaamath.com 2009), and this helps
in the pursuit of centralised power. For example, now scientific institutions can tell us, or something as
simple as a ruler, how much space is in one centimetre squared, or one litre of water.

Power then becomes “action at a distance” (Latour 1990). The dawn of printing, as is evidenced by all the
above scholars, begun the centralisation of power into small minorities. In turn, these minorities begun to
control the majority from afar. Operating from national centres of calculation, the few use “red-tape” and
“paper shuffling” to hide the power they have over others (1990: 55). Through the overwhelming number
of forms circulating around the office, or indeed around the world, we take for granted their mundane
nature. But this is where the power lies: in the mundane nature of print. Mundane techniques are also
where knowledge lies. The “immutable-mobiles” (1990: 26) created by print allowed different forms of
truth the be spread throughout the world, at great speeds and with hardly any damage. This in turn
began the downfall of widespread religious belief and the ascent of science. The agonistic nature of
knowledge was therefore created: “once one competitor starts building up harder facts, the others have
to do the same or else submit” (1990: 35).

One can see a connection here between the onset of agonistic endeavour with print and postmodern
culture. Both are obsessed with the mass proliferation of texts to the people. However, there is one
major difference. Printing culture demands that a Truth be found from the masses of ‘truths’ out there,
and who is right simply depends on how many people are on your side, and of what calibre. It was
knowledge by (informed) consensus. However, postmodernism demands that we still read and absorb all
these texts, except we choose for ourselves which to follow. Taste and aesthetic appreciation have
overcome the search for Truth, as outlined by Latour. But if we were to follow his ideas, surely we could
still choose to follow his method of agonistic argument, and in turn, search for the ultimate Truth? In
essence, the uses we have made of printing have reached far beyond our expectations. With the onset of
broadcast and online media, printing has downsized somewhat in power, but the uses made of it are still
widely felt, even today.
References

Anderson B., 1991. ‘CULTURAL ROOTS’, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. 2nd Ed. London: Verso. 9-36.

Chandler, D., TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM: TECHNOLOGY-LED THEORIES. Available at:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tdet02.html [Accessed March 25, 2010].

Eisenstein, E., 1980. ‘THE EMERGENCE OF PRINT CULTURE IN THE WEST’, Journal of
Communication. 99-106.

Firat, A.F. & Venkatesh, A., 1995. ‘LIBERATORY POSTMODERNISM AND THE
REENCHANTMENT OF CONSUMPTION’, The Journal of Consumer Research, 22(3), 239-267.

Hirst P. & Wooley P., 1982. ‘FORMATION AND MAINTENANCE OF HUMAN ATTRIBUTES’,
Social Relations and Human Attributes. London: Tavistock Publications.

Latour B., 1990. ‘DRAWING THINGS TOGETHER’, M. Lynch and S. Woolgar eds. Representation in
Scientific Practice. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 19-68.

McLuhan M., 1962. Excerpts. THE GUTENBERG GALAXY: THE MAKING OF TYPOGRAPHIC
MAN. N.p: University of Toronto Press. 86-90; 124-126; 130-133; 144-146; 161-163; 164-166;
199-200.

Mayer-Schonberger, V., 2009. DELETE: THE VIRTUE OF FORGETTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE,
Princeton University Press.

MEASUREMENT. Available at: http://www.aaamath.com/mea.html [Accessed March 30, 2010].

Mercer C., 1992. ‘REGULAR IMAGININGS: THE NEWSPAPER AND THE NATION’, T. Bennett, P.
Buckridge, D. Carter and C. Mercer eds. Celebrating the Nation: a Critical Study of Australian
Bicentenary. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 26-46.

Nietzsche, F., 2006. NIETZSCHE: THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, Cambridge University Press.

Sutton, G., OUROBOROS. Available at: http://www.guide-to-symbols.com/ouroboros/ [Accessed

March 29, 2010].

Williams, R., 1983. ‘REVOLUTION’, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London:
Flamingo. 270-274.

Williams R., 1989. ‘COMMUNICATIONS, TECHNOLOGIES AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS’, What I

Came to Say. London: Hutchinson Radius. 172-192.

Young, C.W. & Supa, M., 1941. ‘MNEMIC INHIBITION AS A FACTOR IN THE LIMITATION OF
THE MEMORY SPAN’, The American Journal of Psychology, 54(4), 546-552.