Technology shapes society's values and social structure.
Veblen's and Marx's tradition. Historians of technology reject the hard version — its effects depend on institutions — and the soft version survives as a claim that some options genuinely close once a technology exists.
In practice
- Two countries adopt the same messaging platform; one uses it to organise strikes and the other to police them, and the platform is identical.
- Once every colleague carries a phone, the option of being unreachable at the weekend has gone, whatever the policy says.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is constraint: a technology makes some arrangements cheap and others expensive, and institutions drift towards the cheap ones without anyone deciding to.
- In its favour
- The soft version is well supported, since some options close once a technology is adopted, as with the motorcar and the layout of cities.
- Against it
- Historians of technology reject the hard version, because technologies are shaped by the societies that adopt them: the same tool is used differently in different places, which a causal arrow in one direction cannot explain.
- Standing
- Contested as a causal account; technologies are shaped by the societies adopting them as much as the reverse.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change