technoculture314-09

The limits of Technicism? Brian Winston entire argument has me somewhat confused. Is he arguing that technology is benign, or is he arguing that it is, in fact, malignant? The main point of the article starts out trying to establish that giving children laptops in third world countries is preventing access to food and shelter and robbing them of an education, and in doing so has an opposite effect to what is intended by the project. Quite obviously Nicolas Negroponte is a very evil man. But does Winston have any more objectiveness? His tangent about technological historical disparities may be an attempt at giving a kind of balanced argument but he quite clearly holds disdain for technicists, even though he might not be far off one himself. Are anti-technicists really so different from pro-technicists? Their claims are equally extreme: ‘Technicism’s gravest problem is that it is disempowering.’
It may well be, but surely anti-technicism is also disempowering. Don’t get me wrong, he has some good points, I had no idea that people thought that poor Rupert Murdoch was ‘merely in technology’s grip.’ How terrible! But, in a round about way, he himself is claiming that now all those little African children will be too because of this laptop scheme. I’m not sure where he stands, perhaps I am reading him completely wrong but I think he should take a step back and smell the daisies. Yes, the project is limited, arguably all schemes to help the third world build infrastructure are, but that doesn’t mean that they are useless or cannot be adapted to be more effective. No matter the capitalist motivations of the technology’s producer surely it signifies a step towards governments that are concerned about education and infrastructure, and that they are prepared, however ill advised, to do something about it.