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Theories of technology, continued …

image title“Intellectual approaches to technology and society can be divided into two broad classes: those that treat a technology as an external, exogenous, or autonomous force that impacts social life and alters history, and those that treat a technology as the embodiment or symptom of a deeper cultural logic, representing or transmitting the cultural ethos that determines history.” — Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.

And more recently:

“There is something deeply depressing about having to argue over the cultural dominance of an immensely successful and beloved filmmaker like George Lucas in the context of art history. In anointing Lucas, Paglia has signed on to a currently popular thesis that blames serious artists who, because of their arrogance, have lost touch with the general public and brought about their own marginalization. This argument claims that the conventional fine arts have diminished in significance, leaving only those innovators who have ’embraced technology’ as worthy of our attention. This is a thin thread on which to hang the appraisal of a living artist. A ‘technology’ is no more than a way of doing something, a means to an end, and throughout history artists have been stimulated by new technological and conceptual ideas. There is nothing shockingly modern about the dynamic between artistic creation and technological innovation, be it an intellectual discovery like perspective or a new piece of hardware like the movie camera or the electric guitar. Art and technology have always moved hand in hand from one epoch to the next.”
Paglia on Art, Glittering Images, Book Review, NYT, John Adams, November 30, 2012.