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Sally Wyatt: An Example Of Technological Determinism

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“The devices we use change the way we live much faster than any contest among genes” (Wu, 2014). Increasingly our society is evolving into a snapchatting, instagramming, selfie-taking, facebook using, tweeting crowd of technology addicts. The thought of someone not using the internet or a mobile phone in their daily life is laughable to most young people. However, this is a relatively new phenomenon. Fifty years ago people were capable of going to lunch without snapchatting their friends and uploading a photo of their meal to Instagram (granted the technology did not exist, but they did not attempt to communicate in a similar way). So what has happened to our society? What has changed people into beings who can't go a day without logging on to social media to pour over details of their “friend's” …show more content…

There is a simple explanation: the development of technology. Technological determinism claims that “technology causes or determines the structure of the rest of society and culture” (Dusek, 2006:84). This essay will contend that social and cultural change has taken place as a direct result from the revolutionary improvements and developments in technology. There are both good and bad elements to this adjustment. To understand and examine this, the work of Sally Wyatt (with references to hard and soft determinism) will be discussed as she examines technological determinism through a symmetrical viewpoint. In conjunction with this, Marshall McLuhan's work will be analysed, with particular reference to his celebrated statement “the medium is the message”. Finally, Wyatt and McLuhan's views will be compared and contrasted in accordance with my understanding of

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This essay sets out to challenge the status quo, that the theory of technological determinism is naïve and will argue by utilising Wyatt’s assertions that technical determinism is more complicated than social shaping theorieswould have us believe. She describes technological determinism as having four distinct types,justificatory, descriptive, methodological and normative. Themes will be explored by examining the film ‘The Matrix’ and the novel ‘Frankenstein’ showing how science and technology is represented in popular culture. Wyatt argues technology causes or affects social change and this essay set out to demonstrates her argument. It will be argued that by opening up technical determinism to more explanations of sociological analysis will

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The focus of his research and academic publishings was Media; what it can be used for, how it can be used, and effects that are a result of using media (Pelkey “Media and Ideology 1”). McLuhan theorized that the medium used to promote a message affects the way in which the message is perceived, coining the phrase “the medium is the message”. “The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (Pelkey “Media and Ideology 1”). If a product is advertised on the radio, the perception listeners have will be different from the perception of those who see the same product on a television advertisement.

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