Deflating the overblown accounts of technology: a review of Don Ihde’s Ironic Technics

Abstract

The field of philosophy of technology is populated by a variety of views of how the general technological character of society shapes and guides our lives. Debates have waged between dystopian accounts, which see technologies to generally have a negative impact, and utopian accounts, which predict that technological advance will solve our problems and improve our lives. Also, in contrast to both of these positions is an instrumentalist view, which argues that technologies merely serve their users’ ends, becoming positive or negative only with respect to the ends to which they are used. Against all of these general accounts sits Don Ihde’s Ironic Technics, a short collection of essays that highlights technology’s concrete specificity, variability, context dependency, and its tendency to defy prediction. Ironic Technics is composed of four independent essays, each addressing from a different angle the complex interrelations between technologies, users, and their cultural and historical contexts. Ihde has a penchant for upending established frameworks of thought that have become overextended in their claims about technology. He finds the counterexamples, unconsidered consequences, and hidden assumptions, which undermine totalizing accounts. Yet the book’s dividends do not come only in the form of negative arguments and deflations. Ihde traces a number of trends, ties together examples that seem at first unrelated, and develops some useful concepts along the way. As a whole, the book makes for a quick read, with its approachable style and abundant examples—from windmills, to medical imaging, to WMDs. Those working within the field of philosophy of technology will find the book to be a usefully concise version of Ihde’s counterpoint deflations of totalizing accounts of technology. Engineers and others working in technology design will find the book of particular use for its punchy and original thoughts. In the first of the four essays, entitled ‘‘Stupidity in the Knowledge Society,’’ Ihde analyzes a cluster of accounts of Western society which claim we have moved past an industrial mode and into one which primarily deals with the transfer of information. Examples of this line of thought include Peter Drucker’s notion of ‘‘the knowledge society,’’ Alvin Toffler’s ‘‘information society,’’ and the common ‘‘post-industrial society.’’ Ihde is suspicious of this move, stating ‘‘part of what I am trying to do, is to wean us from the current hype and tendency to overgeneralize and romanticize the new’’ (7). While he agrees that many features of our society have changed with the ascension of information technologies, he also reminds us about those which have not, and considers whether all changes have been exclusively for the better. His strategy in this chapter is to list a variety of technologies, historical moments, and philosophical views which at first seem unconnected— including Cold War nuclear simulations, WMDs, and Heidegger’s critique of technology—which he then gradually strings back together in their relation to the knowledge society. A central observation Ihde makes is that while the contemporary western world bears many features of a knowledge society, these features come in addition to—and not in place of—those of our industrial society. Our industrial society has not been replaced, and its problems, such as atmospheric pollution, remain. In addition, Ihde points out the ways that central features of the knowledge society, such as computing and the Internet, were born from military projects whose effects are still present, such as nuclear proliferation. R. Rosenberger (&) Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA e-mail: estragon10@yahoo.com