What Technology's "Wants" Mean for Us

This afternoon I had one of those Twitter conversations with Jerrid Kruse that got me thinking about a book I read recently. In What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly paints a picture of technology (or the Technium to be more precise) as a system with its own agenda. You can read a blog post explaining more here, but I've copied the parts I'd like us to consider from an educational perspective:

"So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium? What does technology want?

Possibilities
To increase diversity
To maximize freedom/choices
To expand the space of the possible

Efficiencies
To increase specialization/uniqueness
To increase power density
To increase density of meaning
To engage all matter and energy
To reach ubiquity and free-ness
To become beautiful

Complexity
To increase complexity
To increase social co-dependency
To increase self-referential nature
To align with nature

Evolvability
To accelerate evolvability
To play the infinite game

"In general the long-term bias of technology is to increase the diversity of artifacts, methods, techniques. More ways, more choices. Over time technological advances invent more energy efficient methods, and gravitate to technologies which compress the most information and knowledge into a given space or weight. Also over time, more of more of matter on the planet will be touched by technological processes. Also, technologies tend toward ubiquity and cheapness. They also tend towards new levels of complexity (though many will get simpler, too). Over time technologies require more surrounding technologies in order to be discovered and  to operate; some technologies become eusocial – a distributed existence – in which they are inert when solitary. In the long run, technology increases the speed at which it evolves and encourages its own means of invention to change. It aims to keep the game of change going.   

"What this means is that when the future trajectory of a particular field of technology is in doubt, "all things being equal" you can guess several things about where it is headed:

• The varieties of whatever will increase. Those varieties that give humans more free choices will prevail. 
• Technologies will start out general in their first version, and specialize over time. Going niche will always be going with the flow. There is almost no end to how specialized (and tiny) some niches can get. 
• You can safely anticipate higher energy efficiency, more compact meaning and everything getting smarter. 
• All are headed to ubiquity and free. What flips when everyone has one? What happens when it is free? 
• Any highly evolved form becomes beautiful, which can be its own attraction. 
• Over time the fastest moving technology will become more social, more co-dependent, more ecological, more deeply entwined with other technologies. Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born first. 
• The trend is toward enabling technologies which become tools for inventing new technologies easiest, faster, cheaper. 
• High tech needs clean water, clean air, reliable energy just as much as humans want the same."

I think we all recognize that technology is ever-changing, but when we think of technology as having the above-described agenda, what does that mean for our educational systems as they become increasingly tech-integrated? 

Comments

[Jerridkruse]

Bridgette,
First off, I enjoyed our conversation this afternoon. I usually end up getting the cold shoulder from folks when I bring up the negative aspects of tech, so thanks for continuing to engage!

As far as this post, Kelly's book reminds me of a book called "the Nature of Technology" by W. Brian Arthur. Both of these books use evolutionary thinking to describe how technology moves forward. In some ways Kelly's book takes on a Lamarkian view in that he claims technology has particular desires in its evolution. While both of these books have important insight on how technology biases and past technologies affect other technologies, they don't pay much attention to how technology causes bias in and deeply affects human beings. They admit their is a complex relationship between tech and humans, but they don't explore the nuances very deeply.

I'd like to look at just Possibilities and Efficiencies related to teaching and learning. Our dialogues tend to focus on possibilities of tech. Some might call these technology's affordances. However, this rhetoric misses that technology has cues about how to be used. I remember one class period when my students were working on laptops and they were much much quieter than usual. I asked them why they thought that was and even my 8th graders recognized that the design of the laptops promotes individual work (one keyboard, one mouse, one screen, etc). Yes, we can actively work against such cues, but first we have to recognize that the cues are their and realize how powerful they are. Usually we just assume tech's cues are going to point us toward better teaching and learning, but that is usually not the case. Consider IWB and their typical installation at the front of the room - hello teacher centered instruction! These embedded messages are hard to identify, and hard to work against - even harder if we refuse their existence and call technology "neutral". These embedded messages lead me to the next issue, efficiency.

Technology is highly interested in efficiency. New tech is faster, cheaper, and more user friendly. Yet, if we let efficiency be a goal, I will not be surprised if we see more and more lecture. Powerpoint and lecture is highly efficient. I remember one teacher telling me how great it would be record their "presentations" so they can just replay them the next year. Oh, crap! Sure that is very very efficient, but to never modify instruction based on a new group of students is the opposite of good teaching. Yet, the affordances and cues of new tech leads some people down that path. So we need to recognize how some of the goals of technology are antithetical to the goals we ought have for our students and for our educational system.

I think these are things that very few of us are thinking about as we work to reform education. My chief concern is that we'll use technology to reform education right back to where we started without even realizing it.

[Account Deleted]

I enjoyed reading all of your posts your blog contain a lot of valuable information. You have done a nice job.
http://how-many-calories.blogspot.com/