ABSTRACT
The role that technology plays in social change is experienced by us all on a daily basis. Whether cleaning our home, purchasing an air ticket over the internet, paying for shopping at a supermarket or borrowing a book from the library, we continually experience changes to our normal or routine ways of doing things that can be attributed to the introduction of some new technology or other. But do such experiences provide evidence to support the thesis of technological determinism? One of the few sources of agreement in the recent technology literature, is that the answer to this question must be ‘no’ – technological determinism must be wrong. However, I want to suggest that this ‘agreement’ actually obscures a problem with the treatment of technology. Namely, I want to suggest that certain questions posed by so-called technological determinists remain unaddressed (and perhaps unaddressable) by technological determinism’s critics, at least those most rooted in social constructivism. Implicitly, of course, I am suggesting that the questions asked by so-called technological determinists are important ones. And indeed I believe their importance explains why so many writers on technology are continually drawn to the ‘flame’ of technological determinism (see Smith & Marx, 1996).
