How the years pass. Tonight I begin my sixthfifth run of my module that is currently titled Media, Technology and Society. I realise sixfive(!) runs of a module might not sound like a lot particularly, but this is a module that has evolved significantly through the previous fivefour run throughs. I received it in 2010 as Media and Society, almost a sort big picture ‘Media 101’ type module. As time passed, and my Department’s wider curriculum evolved, I focused the module on media understood as technologies, mediums or forms – and resultantly added ‘Technology’ to mark the change. By the time next year comes around I’ll be pedantically changing the title again, with ‘Society’ being swapped for ‘Culture’. Not to invoke Margaret Thatcher mind you (her ‘there is no such thing as society’ comment to Women’s Own magazine in 1987). Rather, it’s in recognition that the module has for some time mainly traded in positing that media technology (i.e. mediums) and media culture (i.e. mediation) are in an utterly ambiguous relationship.

Of course, the trick in positing that ambiguous relationship, the end game, as it were, is to actually encourage students to eventually arrive at the conclusion that there is an irreducible relationship between any singular medium and its social or cultural contexts. Obviously, there are traces here of Bruno Latour’s ‘Irreductions’ (the second part of his book The Pasteurization of France – a favoured version of Latour for someone such as Graham Harman), not to mention the phenomenological tradition, which occupies an increasing amount of my headspace. But this is an intermediate module which is overwhelmingly taken by first year undergraduates – if at the tail end of their introductory first year, in preparation for moving onto the more intermediate themes of their second. So I’m not really talking too much about Latour, and I’m certainly running through his irreductions in any detail; as for phenomenology, well maybe I’ll throw a loose reference to Heidegger’s hammer. But in the main, I talk about that irredicible relationship in terms of a sort of chicken-and-egg riddle, similar to Michael Warner’s notion of the chicken-and-egg circularity of publicness (opens PDF).

The thing is, getting to that end game does take a wee bit of reduction, if only temporary. There’s a need in other words to encourage students to explore some writers who at least on the surface do appear to be rather reductive about media technology, or about media culture. And though as these years pass I worry it’s getting old, getting somewhat stale, I can’t stop returning to Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams, and talking up their disagreement, or misunderstanding, or tectonic relationship, when it comes to thinking about media technology. Maybe it’s because I’m a Canadian, a Torontonian, who once lived in Wales. But more likely, it’s that there’s just something interesting about the way in which different ideas about media are embodied by two very different yet both rather public intellectuals.

Modules always evolve, though, so I’m trying make sure the reduction is as temporary as possible; achieving a learning outcome, without it also being taken home as sedimented truth. But it’s not just about combating reduction with reminders about chickens and their eggs. In the main, it seems to me that it’s mainly about introducing students to new ways of thinking about what ‘technology’ might imply. One route is to simply point to the interdisciplinar engineer Stephen Kline, who back in 1985 set out a typology which highlighted how technology can be more than hardware and artefacts – it can also refer to sociotechnical systems of manufacture, forms of technical knowledge, and sociotechnical systems of use. Another is to get away from men and their inventions. Last year, to my horror, a female student mentioned matter-of-factly in a tutorial that, of course, this module of mine on media technologies was really more of a masculine thing. This was to my horror because I had liked to think I’d been really quite deliberate in ensuring questions of gender are central to the module, via the course content and particularly the required readings. Clearly there is more to do there. One thing I might try to advance a notion of technology closer to David Edgerton in The Shock of the Old, a book which not only gets away from an over-validation of the new, but at the very outset makes clear it deals with the history of technology not in terms of boys and their toys, but for grown-ups of all genders (I’ll leave the ageism aside for now).

Perhaps one further route is to make some small, nontechnical, light-on-philosophy nods to a very basic version of Bernard Stiegler, and particularly the idea of technicity (highlighted to me by Sam Kinsley’s writing on so-called virtual space). At risk of misrepresenting the richer philosophical arguments at play here, what I’d like to get across to my students is that perhaps this chicken-and-egg riddle of media technology and culture runs really, really deep. Perhaps we might think about how, as Stiegler does, humanity itself is defined through technics – i.e. that there is no ‘humanity’ prior to the technics-body entanglement. This idea, which puts technology at the heart of human evolvution, is an idea that can also be seen in N. Katharine Hayles’ recent ruminations on ‘technogenesis’ (see also a long-ago post on this by myself). So how will I get this across to students? Perhaps the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? Hmmm… or maybe I’ll just keep talking about chickens and eggs.