Beyond one word metaphors, the middle-ground position, saying it depends and other oversimplified counsel

This is Part I of a series called "Living Responsibly and Gracefully with Technology"

In this post series I wish to explore a fascinating idea Jenna McWilliams brought to my attention – the idea that extremist positions on technology may in fact not be as divided and polarized as scholars (and the extremists themselves) make them out to be. Even more intriguing, is an implication of McWilliams position which renders the commonly-given advice to extremist positions, take the middle-ground, as simplistic and even nonsensical. Surprised by this implication, and the ungrounding of a truth (the middle-ground position) I held to be self-evident, I began wondering what other frequently given counsel and advice concerning our relations with technology is potentially wanting and ill-formed. In the course of this inquiry, I discovered how the quest for one word metaphors is itself misleading despite the advice and counsel sophisticated metaphors generate. I also discovered how the similarities between the advice and counsel of technologists and naturalists, utopianists and dystopianists, and even between extremists and middle-grounders alike, pivots around a strange underlying faith-assumption regarding the nature of human beings. Lastly, I discovered that the ostensibly reasonable and sensible advice of saying ‘it depends’ when asking about the role of technology in life reveals an unsophisticated grasp of the nature of technology.

To frame the following discussion of these curious thoughts and their implications I will engage in the same inquiry project as Burbules and Callister, Nardi and O’Day: complicating our oversimplified ideas of technology. To do so requires a review of Burbules and Callister’s, and Nardi and O’Day’s own identified fallacies of the technocratic dream – technology as inevitable, technology as deterministic, technology as liberating. Then I will describe Nardi and O’Day’s metaphors of technology – technology as tool, text, system, and ecosystem – carefully differentiating between what is under-sophisticated and false about these metaphors from what is revealing and true about these metaphors. My first argument will be that the quest to find the one perfect metaphor to delineate technology is itself an under-sophisticated appreciation of the nature of metaphors. I will switch the goal from selecting among contending metaphors that best characterize technology to rendering each metaphor more sophisticated, and collecting them each to give a fuller picture of the nature of technology. Doing so requires paying attention to the sophisticated and not-so-sophisticated versions of each metaphors. The ground beneath each metaphor, as it were, needs to be cleared away where it is still hanging onto the technocratic fallacies of inevitability, determinism, and liberation. Finally, each metaphor needs to be replanted within the supporting context of an idea that gives the metaphor its meaning, so that each is not just left lying in abstraction and isolation.

To do this will shift our thinking away from selecting between tool, text, system, ecosystem, to portraying a tool as part of a system, a text as part of a discourse community, etc., so that we can render each metaphor sophisticated enough to reveal something about the true nature of technology in order to better guide our advice and counsel as well to show the misgivings of previous given and commonly-held advice. The other misgivings, the middle-ground position, the binding faith-assumption of technologists/naturalists/extremists/middle-groundists, etc, and the ‘it depends’ garden-variety advice will be the subject of Parts II-IV. With the help of a few thinkers including John Dewey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Hescel, I may even be able to share their wisdom and sophisticated counsel for living in a technological world in Part V.



Bonnie Nardi, Vicki O’Day, Burbules and Callister all give a wonderful performance of taking our most simplistic ideas of technology and complicating them. To begin with the simplistic ideas that form the technocratic dream: The idea that technology is an inevitable force, as so many prominent figures tend to pronounce, is not true when we take into consideration the role of laws, funding agencies, and individual decision makers who cast their own influence on technology. Or take the idea that technology is not just an inevitable force but a deterministic force, one that is single-handedly and against our wills transforming the way we act, we think, and relate to one another. Yet, when we look around, or give an honest appreciation of our capacities to act and reflect, we might notice that technology is not a rampant force running freely and determinedly through society, but rather is restrained and restricted by our own choices, our own attitudes, and our own priorities. The television may hold a central place in the living room, but it is not turned on 24 hours a day. The cell phone may follow us throughout our day but we do not always answer our calls. Web Advertisements flank our visits to the web but we do not endlessly click on them. Technology does influence us, no doubt, but as meaning-making creatures and significance-seeking wonderers we have the ability to reflect on our experiences and redirect our behavior and attitudes and make conscious choices to turn off the television when appropriate, ignore our phone calls, and not click the advertisements.

Ah, the simple ideas governing our perception of technology is endless and Nardi, O’Day, Burbules, and Callister go on and on. If technology is not oversimplified because it is seen as an inevitable and deterministic force, then it is oversimplified because it is seen as an unproblematic liberating force, one that will resolve our social ills and augment our physical conditions, so that we can live without conflict or disaster. The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the diseased will be cured, the war-torn will be prosperous, etc. etc. This prophetic vision of course, neglects the realities that govern the world: physical limits to technology’s growth and development, equity limits to who gets the technology and who the technology is for, technology’s own limits and tendencies towards unintended and undesired consequences (with the car – which gives speed to the speedless a prophet might say – we have the car crash, car pollution, road development, ecosystem displacement, etc), as well as the very real human limits, our existential problems – finding value and significance in our lives, our work, our relations, even in our failures, set-backs and broken relationships. Even if technology could resolve our technical problems by calculating upon and coordinating together all of our machines and society, the important existential work of forging values, drawing meaning from our lives, and tending to our broken relationships cannot be resolved by technical matrices or delegated out to technological operators. Technology wont fix my broken relationships for me, wont tell me if I’m falling in love with the right person, or make my kids grow fonder of me. Technology wont make nature speak more eloquently to us, or electrify our life with vigorous meaning. And if it did, if we delegated those aspects of life we call living responsibly and gracefully, to technology alone, then we give up our responsibility and with it our freedom to take responsibility, and without that freedom we miss out entirely on any liberating effects technology may have to claim.

To move beyond the fallacy of technology as an overwhelming force to technology as revealed through limited metaphors – technology as tool, as text, as system – is still debilitating so long as the metaphors give way to another fallacy – the notion that technology is fundamentally neutral. Resolving this fallacy, and thereby salvaging the suggested metaphors from it, will be the task of the next section. It may belabor the point to characterize each of these metaphors in their simplicity, but one of my arguments in part II rests on unmasking the simplicity of projects that believe they can get to the heart of technology (and its significance for our lives) by replacing it with one metaphor for another. After all, a desire for the one right metaphor to characterize technology is dangerously close to the desire for the one right technology to liberate our society or educational system or whatnot. I also believe that each metaphor, in its sophisticated form, is invaluable to a discussion proper of how to live responsibly and gracefully with technology. So allow me to characterize the sophisticated and unsophisticated forms of these metaphors.

Technology as a neutral tool that can be used for good or bad purposes has an intuitive appeal when we think of hot button societal issues such as the use of surveillance cameras, genetic cloning, nuclear deterrence: we can use our technologies for security or intrusion, protection or harm. But the usage is not neutral; this is because technology has its own characteristics – its own functionality, design, logic, and purposes. This can be evidenced in the most ordinary and mundane seeming of technologies, from toasters to stereos to washing machines. One is not so much freely choosing between good and bad purposes for these devices as they are acting in accordance with the logic and purposes of the devices themselves. This logic is prevalent but overlooked even in the non-neutral tool metaphor of technology according to Burbules and Callister. The logic of most of our technological machines, instruments, devices, and tools is a logic of control and precision, calculation and efficiency – an instrumental calculus of minimal means for producing maximum benefits. As Burbules and Callister phrase it “The technocratic mindset takes the “relation of means and ends” itself as given.” The purpose inherent to the technocratic logic is always the same and relatively straightforward – to produce commodities, efficiently.

The significance of the issue becomes relevant when we compare, as Albert Borgmann does in his work on the philosophy of technology, a thing such as a guitar with a device such as a stereo. The two are similar in that they are technologies that communicate music, but their internal logic is completely different. The stereo produces the commodity of music at the touch of a button or flip of a switch. It does so regardless of time, place, audience, or the character of its user. A guitar, on the other hand, demands more than a touch of a button; it requires skill and concentration, a knowledge of music and careful handling. A single song may be played differently at different times of days, in different locations, to different audiences, depending on the rhythm, mood, or purpose of the situation. Neither of these technologies are neutral – one produces music uniformly (albeit sometimes with mechanical glitches), while the other plays music diversely. One produces music without regard to the context, nature, or sensibilities of its listeners, the other captures music according to the time, place, audience, and character of its user. These differences are not trivial, nor restrained to guitars and stereos (if we think through the differences between fireplaces and heaters, bicycles and cars, cross-country paths and treadmills, stove-top cooking and microwaves, and so forth), and thus are profound enough for us to consider our ideas of technology as neutral or even non-neutral tools as overly simplistic.

In many ways the discussion of technology as tool parallels the discussion of technology as text. Some people think of technology as a neutral text, again when considering societal hot button issues, such as the content of television shows, video games, web sites, and social networking forums. These technological mediums and spaces can be used to communicate good or bad content and portray good or bad messages so it would seem. Yet, just as in our previous discussion, technologies carry their own messages, despite what messages their designers have programmed into them. Thus, a something as seemingly ordinary as an electronic chip in a ‘birthday card’ that sings ‘happy birthday’ when you open it delivers more than just a song. It communicates cultural values and rituals tied up with birthdays, as well as with giving and receiving presents. To some it may communicate wastefulness and carelessness of money, technology, the environment. To others it may communicate a thoughtful gift or a thoughtless novelty item. These messages are in the realm of non-neutral text – a text that communicates many cultural messages aside from its content of a happy birthday song.

To move even further, and complicate this more, we would ask what are the messages conveyed by the character of the technology itself. The electronic chip plays only when the card is opened, and stops when the card is closed, communicating the notion of ‘surprise’ and ‘replayability.’ The chip plays the song only in the English language privileging a specific audience, and it only plays a specific song, thus, marginalizing other modes of expression – stories, aphorisms, personal notes, etc – as well as marginalizing other sentiments and emotions felt during birthdays (anxiety over growing older, graciousness for making it this far, embarrassment for being the center of attention, etc, etc.) Furthermore, the song does not invite others to sing along, or to be customized, thus suggesting a uniform way to interact with it: passive listening. And further still, the electronic chip is hidden within the seams of the card, suggesting that its users are not to investigate its nature, to let it remain hidden, a black box of sorts conveying both a sense of ‘magic’ and a false sense of security that the chip wont break; out of sight out of mind. After all the message would be completely different if the card came with a repair kit, or an instruction manual, and even more different if it came with a USB plug-in to be connected into a computer to be shared online or to upload new and different songs into it. And of course, these thoughts do not apply to electronic greeting cards only, but sweepingly cover all technological mediums. As Marshall McLuhan famously put it (referring not to birthday cards but technology in general), the medium is the message.

These metaphors, I believe, do not suffer from being false – they are true to the nature of technology. In as much as technology’s underlying functional logic is illuminated when technology is thought of as a tool, and in as much as technology’s conveyed messages are made explicit when thought of as a text, both of these metaphors are true. Where they suffer is in their incompleteness and in their under-sophisticated versions. We want to be clear to differentiate between under-sophisticated ideas such as technology as inevitable, technology as deterministic, technology as liberating, and technology as neutral, which ascribe characteristics that are not true to technology, from limiting metaphors such as technology as tool, technology as text, etc, that do get at the true characteristics of technology. The remaining project for part I is to offer an even more sophisticated vision of both tool and text, as well as to provide a third metaphor (in a sophisticated form) to round out our characterization of technology.

Currently we have two isolated words, tool and text, that give us a view of the functionality of technology through the logic and uses of technology as a tool, and of the meaning of technology through the messages and interactions it privileges and marginalizes as a text. It is at this point where I must make a significant departure from Nardi and O’Day’s simplistic organizational schema of one-word metaphors listed in succession, in order to advance a more sophisticated conceptualization of how these metaphors are related to one another. After this breach, I will return to Burbules and Callister post-technocratic view of technology to flesh out a final third metaphor – in addition to tool and text – while relating it to the context of Nardi and O’Day’s ecosystem. This third metaphor will not speak to the functionality or the meaning of technology, but to its ‘significance.’ Bear with me here as I propose an alternative conceptualization of how each metaphor can be made sense of by placing it in its proper context:

Tool: System
Text: Discourse
____: Ecosystem

Or phrased analogously,

A tool is to a system as
A text is to a discourse as
A ___ is to an ecosystem

Whereby the underlying logic of the analogy is that the second term contextualizes and gives meaning to the first term.

Burbules and Callister will help us solve for the _____ soon, but for now let us imagine that the metaphor of a tool, which tells us how technology functions, is more meaningful when technology as a tool is understood as technology as part of a system, where there are numerous tools (i.e. functions) working together to coordinate, maintain, and regulate the system. This system need not be tangible in the case of a machine, but we can think of the system as an underlying paradigm that shares the same underlying logic as each tool – a calculus of means and ends relationships. This after all is the fear of what Nardi and O’Day characterized as the systems metaphor thinkers. Jacques Ellul writes “The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” The entire system is plush with the logic that can be found in the devices and tools of the system.

Or as Langdon Winner posits, “We have already seen arguments to the effect that persons adapt themselves to the order, discipline, and pace of the organizations in which they work. But even more significant is the state of affairs in which people come to accept the norms and standards of technical processes as central to their lives as a whole. A subtle but comprehensive alteration takes place in the form and substance of their thinking and motivation. Efficiency, speed, precise measurement, rationality, productivity, and technical improvement become ends in themselves applied obsessively to areas of life in which they would previously have been rejected as inappropriate . . . Is the most product being obtained for the resources and effort expended? The question is no longer applied solely to such things as assembly-line production. It becomes equally applicable to matters of pleasure, leisure, learning, every instance of human communication, and every kind of activity, whatever its ostensive purpose.” The system contextualizes the meaning of the tool. It is important to keep in mind, however, in as much as these thinkers mistake technology (and thus tools or the system) as being inevitable, deterministic, liberating, or neutral they are mistaken.

Similarly, with a text is made sense of the discourse, or the discourse community, it is a part of. The norms, values, and conventions of the form, the genre, the community members, and the culture that the text is a part all weigh in or mediate the message of the text. In order to understand the message of a text, then, one must attempt to grasp the worldview, practices, and values of the designer of the text as they are mediated by the form, genre, community, and culture the text was produced by. Although such an interpretive feat may be quite difficult, it is one key to understanding the character of technology, it’s message-bearing character, which is just as important as understanding its functional-usage character. For those students who took Kylie Peppler’s New Media and Learning course we read several articles – by Gee, Cowan, Moje, etc – whose point was that texts are best understood in terms of discourse communities. Indeed, cultural anthropologists (Geertz, 1973), historians (Fischer, 1970), literary critics (Frye, 1951), archaeologists, and philosophers (Husserl, 1973) and theologians make similar arguments about the meaning of a text. Thus we can say that the adequate context to think of technology as a text is a discourse community. Just as we could say the adequate context to think of technology as a tool is a system.

To work backwards, on the final metaphor, we will start with its context: an ecosystem. The heart and crux of Nardi and O’Day’s project, as we have seen, is too complicate all of our simplistic notions of technology, while preferring their own nuanced views of technology as part of a local ecosystem of manifold interactions and interrelationships. Nardi and O’day’s conceptualization of technology as ecosystem does afford consideration and counsel for how to live responsibly and gracefully with technology. Readers are directed towards appreciating the values, diversity and keystone species of their local ecosystems – be it their home, their place of work, their favorite coffeeshop, and so forth. There are many forms this mode of appreciation can take: maintaining disciplined focus on the values of their communities and the how various technologies interact with these values; paying attention to the interrelationships of the members of the community and how a change in just one technology may have far-reaching and indirect consequences for others; appreciating the role of not just the gatekeepers and the guardians of technological know-how, but also all the minute and otherwise mundane micro-interactions between persons as they operate and maintain and share their knowledge of technologies, keeping their ecosystem alive and well. Nardi and O’Day also leave readers with a selection of valuable strategic questions worth asking of values, technologies, and ecosystems that can help us better understand how to live responsibly and gracefully with technology.


Although I believe Nardi and O’Day’s succeeded in both projects: complicating our simplistic views of technology and in providing us with counsel for living responsibly and gracefully within technology, I believe they fall short in properly characterizing the complex nature of technology itself. This is not to say that they failed to characterize the complex nature of the context of technology, the local ecosystems that are home to technology, for Nardi and O’Day did a beautiful job of characterizing this. However, the metaphor itself, ecosystem, does not tell us about the major characteristics or decisive features of technology itself, that differentiate it from say nature or physical phenomenon. Technology is part of the ecosystem, true, but what is it. And more importantly, what is it beyond a tool in a system, and a text in a discourse?

To answer this question, we will turn to Burbules and Callister’s characterization of technology, and ask if it is compatible with the notion of ecosystem, and if there is any helpful word, image, or metaphor (as there is with tool and text) that best captures their view. Already their vision of posttechnocratic thinking appropriately characterizes the uncertainty, multiplicity, and ambiguity within ecosystems, “The posttechnocratic mode of thinking we are proposing here would stress the limits to human foresight and planning, the inderdependency of multiple consequences, and the problematic attempt to sort out good from bad consequences.” This is not a world of inevitability, determinism, or passive neutralism, it is a world that must be experienced, appreciated and asked the right strategic questions if it is to be understood; and even then one might understand say the limits of the world, but not hope to surpass them (such knowledge is crucial to living responsibly and gracefully as we will see in part V if I make it that far). The authors go on to state, “we want to stress the inseparability of good and bad in all complex human circumstances and the error of imagining that we can readily evaluate such matters individually and discretely.” Thus we need a term that shows the inseparability of good and bad in technology. At the very least we can readily generate ideas of technology as inseparably good and bad. Earlier we took the car as being inseparable from the car crash (an example from Paulo Virilo). One could also think of the vaccine as both cure and poison (an example loosely taken from Jacques Derrida). Or of medicine in general – drugs, pills, etc. – as both life-giving (in the right amount of dosage), and life-threatening (in the wrong amount of dosage). Perhaps we could say that with drugs, pills, and medicine comes the inseparability of the phenomenon of overdosing.

Thus, technologies tend to nestle their opposites together. For some scholars this is a more worrisome and anxiety-producing concern than the image of technology as tool with its efficiency logic intruding into our lives or as a text with its rhetoric that privileges many at the cost of the few. At the same time, this conception of technology is not mutually exclusive with tools or texts, because tools also straddle the line of productive/unproductive and functional/dysfunctional while the messages a text privileges is inseparable from the messages it marginalizes and with the possibility of understanding these texts comes the possibility of misunderstanding. Thus, we are after a metaphor that can adequately capture this notion of inseparability that constitutes technologies, binding together its opposing natures in one fell swoop.

The word I wish to use I am afraid has no proper translation into the English language. It comes from the Greeks, and is termed adiaphora, loosely meaning indifferent or neither good or bad. The Stoics came up with the term in response to the Cynics ethical conception of the world as black and white. The Stoics argued that there was a third category, a grey area that was neither black nor white, good or bad, but inbetween. To this area they designated everything that was not virtue (reason) or vice (passions), objects such as money, food, jewelry, as well as conditions such as wealth, health, reputation. A loose rule of thumb is that everything that is in their control (their capacity for reason, their free choice, their attitudes, etc) is perceived as diaphora (either good or bad), but everything that is outside of their control, even if it is partly outside of their control (fortunes depends on the viability of the economy to an extent, reputation depends on the gossip and rumors told by others, food depends on the weather, etc, etc.) is relegated to adiaphora (seen without goodness or badness, hence the addition of the ‘a’ to diaphora).

The Stoics further distinguished between what we could translate as relevant and irrelevant adiaphora. Relevant adiaphora are those objects or conditions most relevant to what we could translate as ethical practices or social commitments or even Nardi and O’Day’s local ecosystem values, whereas irrelevant adiaphora are those objects or conditions least relevant to ethical concerns. How many grains of sands are on a beach or whether one has facial hair may be irrelevant adiaphora, while one’s vocation or marriage or relationship to their children may be quite relevant to their ethical practices and local ecosystem values.

The crucial difference between Burbules and Callister view of the posttechnocratic dream, and this premodern view of adiaphora is that the Stoics would resist the urge to label each opposition inherent and inseparable in technology (cure/poison) as good or bad. It may seem unproblematic and straightforward to claim that the aspect of pills that cures us is good while the aspect that poisons us is bad, but the Stoics would say that pills are neither good or bad, and further still neither cures or poisons are good or bad, because both are outside of our ‘complete’ control and somewhat up to chance. Instead, the stoics would say how we conduct ourselves during times of sickness and during times of health can be good or bad, responsible or irresponsible, graceful or disgraceful, and so forth. And how we attribute our conditions – of health or sickness – to objects and events outside of our control (such as the development of medicine) can either be knowing or ignorant, humble or arrogant. Do we moan and complain and say “why me” when technology fails to cure us? Or do we take responsibility for our illness and muster through it? And likewise the days when we are in good health, do we show gratitude, thanking technology and other things outside of our control, for allowing us to live with longevity, knowing full well that another day we may not be as healthy or lucky? Or do we go on, thinking little of the development of technology and the role it plays in keeping us well, and thinking instead of how special and powerful we are to fend off illness so successfully.

Now that we have our metaphors straightened out, and now that we see how each metaphor is a perspective or lens through which to get at some crucial feature of technology, and now that we understand each perspective needs a modifier or qualifier to bring it into fuller relief, we can lay out the updated metaphor model:

Technology is a tool in a system and
Technology is a text in a discourse and
Technology is adiaphora in an ecosystem.

All three metaphors, and their modifiers (and taken away from their technocratic fallacies of inevitability, determinism, neutrality, etc) are all necessary to give us a clearer conception of technology. Viewing technology as just one of these metaphors alone then may not be advisable or good counsel. Viewing them altogether on the other hand, tells us about the functionality, the meaning, and the significance of technology to our lives and ethical practices (more to elaborate on this in part V).

But what does viewing technology as adiaphora, over other metaphors, buy us? First it allows us to stop asking whether technology is good or bad. It’s not just that the two are inseparable in technology, it’s that technology in of itself is neither. This does not make technology neutral, as technology can be more or less relevant to our ethical practices, life narrative, life projects, social commitments, local ecosystem values and so forth. Even technology relevant to our local ecosystem values is not a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes. Or at least it’s not that simple, because purposes are internally related to the attitudes, actions, and interactions that aim to bring them about. And this is where the focus of good or bad is placed – under those things that are in our control such as our attitudes, our actions, our perspectives, our deportment, etc. (remember, it’s those things that are under our control that can be good or bad, while its those things outside of our complete control, such as technology or the weather, that is termed indifferent”) What is good or bad then, under the adiaphora perspective, is not technology, but how we handle ourselves in the presence of technology. The onus of responsibility shifts to us. Do we handle ourselves responsibly by asking strategic questions of technology? Or do we handle ourselves carelessly by overlooking technology’s place in our local ecosystem? Or by neglecting to acknowledge technology’s double character – car/crash cure/poison? Do we handle ourselves gracefully by respecting technology’s limits and appreciating its possibilities? Or do we handle ourselves arrogantly by believing we can have one half of the technology (the car) without ever having to face the consequences of the other half (car crash)? These are the strategic questions that might begin to get at our own conduct, attitudes, interactions, etc.

The same is true of other adiaphora such as marriage or holding a career or raising children. We would not ask if the marriage is good or bad, but rather we would ask if our conduct is good or bad. Likewise, we would not ask if divorce (the inseparable concept to marriage) is good or bad, but rather if our conduct during the divorce was responsible or irresponsible, etc. Thus, adiaphora, above and beyond the ecosystem metaphor, allows us to envision the inseparable opposing concepts inherent in technology, while also appreciating that these opposing concepts are not simply understood as good vs. bad, but are ‘indifferent’ to good and bad, living in limbo in a grey area, whose ethical valence can only be understood with reference to the ethical nature of the conduct with which any technology is handled. This significantly shifts the burden of responsibility from good and bad technologies (which do not exist) to good and bad conduct, or attitudes towards, or interactions with the technologies in our lives and in our local ecosystems.