Here are some extracts from the classical and more contemporary books aiming at the definition of technology and media.

I suggest several questions you keep in mind while reading and ask you to answer them before the class. At the Zoom session we'll discuss these theoretical approaches and try to figure out where their blind zones are and whether they can be productive in your research projects.

The extracts are the following:

• Mumford, L. (1971). Technics and human development: the myth of the machine, vol. I (pp. 381-410). Harvest Books — Extract — Book
• Simondon, G. (1989) On the mode of existence of technical objects — Extract — Book
• Heidegger, M. (1954). The question concerning technology. Technology and values: Essential readings — Extract — Book
• Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. (Eds.). (2010). Critical terms for media studies. University of Chicago Press — Extract — Book
• Latour, B. (1990). Technology is society made durable. The Sociological Review, 38(1_suppl), 103-131 — Extract — Article

With man's persistent exploration of his own organic capabilities, nose, eyes, ears, tongue, lips, and sexual organs were given new roles to play. Even the hand was no mere horny specialized work-tool: it stroked a lover's body, held a baby close to the breast, made significant gestures, or expressed in shared ritual and ordered dance some otherwise inexpressible sentiment about life or death, a remembered past, or an anxious future. Tool-technics, in fact, is but a fragment of biotechnics: man's total equipment for life. (...)

To consider man, then, as primarily a tool-using animal, is to overlook the main chapters of human history. Opposed to this petrified notion, I shall develop the view that man is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities lies first in his own organism, and in the social organization through which it finds fuller expression. Until man had made something of himself he could make little of the world around him. (...)

The second point is that the grave social defects of the human machine were partly offset by its superb achievements in flood control and grain production, which laid the ground for an enlarged achievement in every area of human culture: in monumental art, in codified law, in systematically pursued and permanently recorded thought, in the augmentation of all the potentialities of the mind by the assemblage of a varied population, with diverse regional and vocational backgrounds in urban ceremonial centers.

Such order, such collective security and abundance, such stimulating cultural mixtures were first achieved in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later in India, China, Persia, and in the Andean and Mayan cultures: and they were never surpassed until the megamachine was reconstituted in a new form in our own time. Unfortunately these cultural advances were largely offset by equally great social regressions.

Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control.

With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once-autonomous human activities: 'mass culture' and 'mass control' made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar 'civilized' atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.

Automatism, however, is a rather low degree of technical perfection. In order to make a machine automatic, one must sacrifice a number of possibilities of operation as well as numerous possible usages. Automatism, and its utilization in the form of industrial organization, which one calls autom ation, possesses an economic or social signification more than a technical one. The true progressive perfecting of machines, whereby we could say a machine's degree of technicity is raised, corresponds not to an increase of automatism, but on the contrary to the fact that the operation of a machine harbors a certain margin of indeterminacy. It is this margin that allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information. Much more than any increase in automatism, it is this sensitivity to information on the part of machines that makes a technical ensemble possible. A purely automatic machine completely closed in on itself in a predetermined way of operating would only be capable of yielding perfunctory results. The machine endowed with a high degree of technicity is an open machine, and all open machines taken together [l 'ensembl des machines ouvertes] presuppose man as their permanent organizer, as the living interpreter of all machines among themselves. Far from being the supervisor of a group of slaves, man is the permanent organizer of a society of technical objects that need him in the same way musicians in an orchestra need the conductor. The conductor can only direct the musicians because he plays the piece the same way they do, as intensely as they all do; he tempers or hurries them, but is also tempered or hurried by them; in fact, it is through the conductor that the members of the orchestra temper or hurry one another, he is the moving and current form of the group as it exists for each of them; he is the mutual interpreter of all of them in relation to one another. Man thus has the function of being the permanent coordinator and inventor of the machines that surround him. He is am ong the machines that operate with him. (...) (18-19)

In order to restore to culture the truly general character it has lost, one must be capable of reintroducing an awareness of the nature of machines, of their mutual relations and of their relations with man, and of the values implied in these relations. This awareness requires the existence of a technologist or mechanologis alongside the psychologist and the sociologist. Moreover, these fundamental schemas of causality and regulation that constitute an axiomatic of technology, must be taught in a universal fashion, in the same way the foundations of literary culture are taught. The initiation to technics must be placed on the same level as scientific education; it is as disinterested as the practice of the arts, and it dominates practical applications as much as theoretical physics does; it can attain the same degree of abstraction and symbolization. A child ought to know what self-regulation is, or what a positive reaction is, in the same way a child knows mathematical theorems.

In order to raise this awareness, it is possible to attempt to define the technical object itself, through the process of concretization and functional over-determination that gives it its consistency at the end-point of a process of evolution, thus proving that it cannot be considered as a mere utensil.

The modalities of this genesis enable one to grasp the three levels of the technical object and their non-dialectical temporal coordination: the element, the individual, and the ensemble. (...) (20)

Lastly, considered as an object of value judgment, the technical object can provoke very different attitudes depending on whether it is considered at the level of the element, at the level of the individual, or at the level of the ensemble.

At the level of the element, the process of its improvement does not introduce any upheavals that would engender anxiety by conflicting with acquired habits: this is the climate of eighteenth century optimism, which introduces the idea of continuous and indefinite progress, bringing about the constant improvement of man's lot. The technical individual entity, on the contrary, becomes for a certain time the adversary of man, his competitor, because man had centralized technical individuality within himself at a time when only tools existed; the machine thus takes the place of man because, as tool bearer, man used to do the job the machine now does. To this phase corresponds a dramatic and impassioned notion of progress, which turns into the rape of nature, the conquest of the world, and the exploitation of energies. This will to power expresses itself in the technophile and technocratic excesses of the thermodynamic era, which take on both a prophetic and cataclysmic spin. Finally, at the level of the technical ensembles of the twentieth century, this thermodynamic energeticism is replaced by information theory, whose content is normative and eminently regulative and stabilizing: the development of technics appears to be a guarantee of stability. The machine, as an element of the technical ensemble, becomes that which increases the quantity of information, increases negentropy, and opposes the degradation of energy: the machine, being a work of organization and information, is, like life itself and together with life, that which is opposed to disorder, to the leveling of all things tending to deprive the universe of the power of change. The machine is that through which man fights against the death of the universe; it slows down the degradation of energy, as life does, and becomes a stabilizer of the world.

Who accomplishes the challenging setting-upon through which what we call the real is revealed as standing-reserve? Obviously, man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing? Man can indeed conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another. But man does not have control over un­ concealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws. The fact that the real has been showing itself in the light of Ideas ever since the time of Plato, Plato did not bring about. The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him.

Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve? The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives tech­ nology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as a subject relates to an object.

Where and how does this revealing happen if it is no mere handiwork of man? We need not look far. We need only appre­hend in an unbiased way That which has already claimed man and has done so, so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed. Wherever man opens his eyes and ears, unlocks his heart, and gives himself over to meditating and striving, shaping and working, entreating and thanking, he finds himself everywhere already brought into the unconcealed. The unconcealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him. When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.

Modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing. Therefore we must take that challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing-reserve in accordance with the way in which it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon or­dering the real as standing-reserve.

We should also emphasize that our invocation of "the human" is not an attempt to resuscitate some ahistorical human essence, much less a traditional humanism. One of the key implications of thinking of media (tools, artifacts, codes, etc.) rather than language as constitutive of human life is that the assumption that the human is metaphysically distinct from other forms of life is called into question. Birds, bees, and beavers produce a kind of natural architecture; animals communicate with one another and with us. A more exact sense of what we mean by "the human" would emphasize the sense in which humanity is a work in progress, a radically historical form of life distinguished not simply by "media" but by cycles of media innovation, invention, and obsolescence. For in media, to paraphrase the Bible only slightly, we live and move and have our being. And they do not remain static, but constitute a dynamic, historically evolving environment or ecosystem that may or may not sustain a recognizable form of human life indefinitely. The most obvious medium in which the human species dwells is the earth's atmosphere, and that, we know, is undergoing drastic, man-made modifications. Human beings now have a greater impact on the environment than rain.

It would not be too far-fetched to think, then, of the present project as emulating meteorology's study of dynamic interactive weather patterns, as an effort toward a "mediarology" that would track the pressure systems and storm fronts that crisscross the man-made world of symbols we have created.
XIV

If we abandon the divide between material infrastructure on the one hand and social superstructure on the other, a much larger dose of relativism is possible. Unlike scholars who treat power and domination with special tools, we do not have to start from stable actors, from stable statements, from a stable repertoire of beliefs and interests, nor even from a stable observer. And still, we regain the durability of social assemblage, but it is shared with the nonhumans thus mobilised. When actors and points of view are aligned, then we enter a stable definition of society that looks like domination. When actors are unstable and the observers' points of view shift endlessly we are entering a highly unstable and negotiated situation in which domination is not yet exerted.

The analyst's tools, however, do not have to be modified and the gradient that discriminates between more and less stable assemblages does not correspond in the least to the divide between technology and society. It is as if we might call technology the moment when social assemblages gain stability by aligning actors and observers. Society and technology are not two ontologically distinct entities but more like phases of the same essential action. By replacing those two arbitrary divisions with syntagm and paradigm, we may draw a few more methodological conclusions. The description of socio-technical networks is often opposed to their explanation, which is supposed to come afterwards. Critics of the sociology of science and technology often suggest that even the most meticulous description of a case-study would not suffice to give an explanation of its development. This kind of criticism borrows from epistemology the difference between the empirical and the theoretical, between 'how' and 'why', between stampcollecting - a contemptible occupation - and the search for causality - the only activity worthy of attention.

Yet nothing proves that this kind of distinction is necessary. If we display a socio-technical network - defining trajectories by actants' association and substitution, defining actants by all the trajectories in which they enter, by following translations and, finally, by varying the observer's point of view - we have no need to look for any additional causes. The explanation emerges once the description is saturated. We can certainly continue to follow actants, innovations, and translation operations through other networks, but we will never find ourselves forced to abandon the task of description to take up that of explanation. The impression that one can sometimes offer in the social sciences an explanation similar to those of the exact sciences is due precisely to the stabilization of networks, a stabilization that the notion of explanation simply does not 'explain'!

Explanation, as the name indicates, is to deploy, to explicate. There is no need to go searching for mysterious or global causes outside networks. If something is missing it is because the description is not complete. Period. Conversely, if one is capable of explaining effects of causes, it is because a stabilized network is already in place.

This text might be useful to understand the role of theories and how they might work in one's particular research. I encourage you to read the full text (article, not book, pp 21-51) or at least scan it.
It is dedicated to the problem of materiality but can be understood in a broader way.

For your convenience and closer attention I extracted the final scheme. You can use it to reflect on the questions listed in the beginning and the second task.

Materiality and communication technology: mediation framework.

• Circle segments represent three elements of infrastructure (labels outside the circle) and corresponding modes of change (labels and arrows inside the circle)

• Example cases graphed as "profiles" across three sectors:

• Twitter feeds (adaptable devices, limited choice of action, open regulatory climate)

• Broadcast/cable television (stable devices, routinized practices, restricted regulatory and institutional environment)

Change processes are more stable toward the center of the figure and more dynamic toward the periphery.

This tripartite scheme aligns broadly with Dahlberg's three areas of new media studies (technology, uses, and social context). It also echoes the analytic trio of text, production and audience that is central to critical/cultural media studies. However, the triad of artifacts, practices, and arrangements is more inclusive, and more explicitly oriented toward the material, observable character of technology, than these other frameworks. For example, arrangements denotes the pragmatic, observable process of making and remaking social relations, and includes a wider range of patterned formations, from interpersonal networks and roles to whole-society institutional forms and structures, than is suggested by either "social context" or "audience." Artifacts foregrounds the material, made nature of communication technologies, which is nearly missing in the notion of "texts," and to some degree obscured by the blanket term "technology," which from a mutual shaping perspective would include all the elements of infrastructure comprised in mediation. Practices is a concrete way to describe communicative action, especially compared with "production" (which implies a distant industrial or institutional process) or interpretive, discursive ideas of "reading" or "reception." It also encompasses a wider repertoire of communicative action than the narrowly instrumental concept of "uses."

All three elements and their corresponding processes articulate and influence one another. Artifacts are made, implemented, and remade (that is, reconfigured) according to people's purposes and actions, as well as the social structures and institutional sanctions that enable or constrain them. For example, people want, and may themselves craft, software applications and devices that are easy to use, reliable, secure, and safe. Institutional authorities demand that systems comply with (or even automatically enforce) an expanding range of privacy laws, intellectual property claims, national security and law enforcement directives, competitive rivalries among firms and trade blocs, and cultural/ethical norms.

Similarly, devices and systems that exist in a given time and place shape users' practices and larger social expectations about what the artifacts can do, what they are for, and what people might actually do with them (that is, practices are remediated). For example, the Internet has become a venue for interpersonal interaction and personal expression as well as straightforward information seeking or the consumption of media products. Facebook members, Twitter users, or subscribers to location-based services like foursquare may worry about how the services gather, aggregate, and share data about them. But many of those same individuals may also readily offer real-time information about their location, or surrender other detailed personal information, if they consider it a fair exchange for the conveniences a service provides, or if authorities assure them that the collection of such information is a necessary and appropriate means to control terrorism, fraud, and so on.

Social and institutional formations also respond and adapt to available systems and devices and to communication practices and norms; that is, they are open to reformation. For example, technology platforms and media products are often designed to be incompatible with those of competitors (the Kindle, Nook, and iPad e-readers; European vs. North American mobile telephone standards). Digital rights-management technologies physically restrict access to and certain uses of various types of media content. The size, responsibilities, and political power of state and private security and law enforcement agencies have vastly expanded in parallel with the proliferation of systems for surveillance, data capture, storage, and analysis, and sharply increased citizen demands for public safety and shelter from risk.

In sum, the articulations among artifacts/reconfiguration, practices/remediation, and social arrangements/reformation are dynamic. Each builds on and reinforces the others; a shift in one aspect can generate corresponding shifts in the other two. This may or may not be a welcome prospect: from the progressive-left or libertarian perspective, preoccupations with risk, safety, control, reliability, and security, and resulting moves toward increasingly monitored, standardized, filtered, regulated, and exclusionary communication systems, actions, and patterns of social and institutional organizing, may look like a vicious circle or regressive feedback loop. On the other hand, articulations also create gaps, spaces of alternative action, or opportunities for pushback, and help ensure that communication technologies remain open to new or unanticipated uses, forms, and understandings.

Here you will find a document with samples of the scheme of elaborating your research question and argument regarding media and technology. The samples are given as inspirational examples rather than any kind of golden standard.

During the Zoom class you will:

• Exchange the schemes between participants and try to imply the groupmates' scheme to your own research.
  
  
• Discuss the results and what did you understand from such an exchange
  
  
• (In groups) try to analyze 2-3 schemes and make an ideal one out of them