"The rich adopt novelties and become accustomed to their use. This sets a fashion which others imitate. Once the richer classes have adopted a certain way of living, producers have an incentive to improve the methods of manufacture so that soon it is possible for the poorer classes to follow suit. Thus luxury furthers progress. Innovation "is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public. The luxury today is the necessity of tomorrow." Luxury is the roadmaker of progress: it develops latent needs and makes people discontented. In so far as they think consistently, moralists who condemn luxury must recommend the comparatively desireless existence of the wild life roaming in the woods as the ultimate ideal of civilized life." Ludwig von Mises
If technology does not emerge from the unfolding of a predetermined logic or a single determinant, then innovation is a 'garden of forking paths'. Different routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes. Significantly, these choices could have differing implications for society and for particular social groups.
“Scholars interested in the relationship between cultural and media change invariably become embroiled in a debate that polarises into two camps: those accused of technological determinism, often linked with the work of McLuhan (1962; 1994); and advocates of the Social Shaping of Technology who emphasise that technologies are always invented and adapted by real people in particular socio-historical circumstances (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). Socio-cultural theory provides an alternative way to think about the implications of media change that stems from the centrality of the idea of the dialectic in post-Vygotskian thought. Wertsch (1998, pp. 23-72; 1995a, pp. 65-68) develops this line of thinking using an analogy that makes reference to the history of pole-vaulting following the invention of fibreglass poles that young athletes exploited to gain an advantage in a competitive Olympic sport.
The technique allows vaulters to exploit the elastic properties of glass fibre to slingshot themselves over the bar. Historically, it allowed vaulters to surpass the records set by Cornelius Warmerdam in 1957 who used a rigid bamboo pole. Interesting, Wertsch tells us that, while young athletes around the world started to appropriate the elastic properties of glass fibre poles, old timers, whose technique depended on the relative rigidity of bamboo poles claimed that the rules of the game had fundamentally changed. Indeed, some claimed it wasn’t the same sport and retired.
This provides a model for thinking about the changing culture of university learning in the new media age. Significantly, the invention of new mediational means (i.e. glass fibre poles) didn’t cause change. Change was driven from the bottom up by young vaulters as they exploited its affordances to gain an edge in a competitive Olympic sport. Similarly, access to digital tools and resources does not cause change in itself; rather change is driven from the bottom-up as advanced learners start to appropriate, experiment and innovate new strategies that depend on the affordances [of] the available cultural tool-kit.” Moonbat Francis “The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age”
It looks like Thomas Jefferson was right. Every society develops it's own aristocracy. Natural aristocracy of virtues and talents. People who are driving force of innovation are natural part of it. It's interesting how little trust in people and their natural pursuit for innovation had people associated with theory of technological determinism.
"What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones." Ludwig von Mises
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