Scope in Technology

optional Theme - technology

What is technology - and what does it do to the mind that uses it?

THE PROVOCATION

What did 1982 think 2019 would look like?

Blade Runner (1982) is set in Los Angeles in November 2019. The opening frames tell you where and when you are, and then the city fills the screen: vast industrial towers, columns of fire, a permanent smog-dark sky, corporate pyramids rising above the haze. Flying police cars move between skyscrapers. Genetic engineers manufacture human beings. Off-world colonies are advertised on enormous billboards. This was one generation's serious attempt to imagine what our world would look like. We are now past that date. Watch the clip below - three moments from the film - and notice what is missing.

Blade Runner - What 1982 thought 2019 would look like

Los Angeles, 2019. The city sprawls beneath a permanent smog, its towers belching fire, its streets crowded with people who will never leave Earth. Above them, the wealthy move in flying cars. The Tyrell Corporation has learned to manufacture human beings - replicants, genetically engineered and built for labour, identical to humans in almost every way except that they are given a fixed lifespan and no legal rights. When replicants go rogue, blade runners are sent to retire them.

The technology that actually changed everything in the years between 1982 and 2019 does not appear. No one has a smartphone. There is no internet. At one point, the protagonist uses a payphone. Blade Runner is a work of extraordinary imagination. The point is that the things it failed to imagine are precisely the things that reshaped daily life most completely: a pocket-sized device that contains a camera, a library, a map, a communication system, and unlimited access to the accumulated knowledge of the species. The technology that did not exist in 1982 was not a dramatic extrapolation of anything that did. It required the convergence of miniaturisation, cellular networks, touchscreen interfaces, GPS, and the internet - none of which were predictably on their way to that convergence.

Technology is the medium through which almost all knowledge now travels - and like any medium, it is not neutral. The algorithms that generate search results, the platforms that carry scientific papers, the tools that run lab equipment, the systems that model climate: knowledge production in the twenty-first century is mediated by technological systems that change what can be known and whose interests are served in knowing it. That makes technology both a subject for TOK and a lens through which the whole course is focused.

The four pages of this theme ask four distinct questions. Scope asks what we mean by technology - and what it does to the minds and societies that use it. Perspectives asks about the human assumptions that are built into the tools. Methods asks what the difference is between processing information and understanding it. Ethics asks who benefits from technology and who is responsible when it causes harm.

Big idea 1 - Technology is older than you think.

Stone tools date to approximately 3.3 million years ago - predating Homo sapiens by roughly three million years. The Oldowan tools found at Lomekwi 3 in Kenya were made by an earlier hominin species, which means that technology did not arise with our species. It is older than us. If technology is what students tend to mean by the word - digital devices, software, artificial intelligence - then we have narrowed our definition to a thin slice of a very long history, and we have lost the tools to understand what technology actually does.

The definition is harder to fix than it looks. A hammer clearly qualifies. So does fire: the controlled use of fire goes back at least 400,000 years, and it transformed human diet, social behaviour, and eventually the size of the human brain. Does writing qualify? The cultural theorist Walter Ong argued that writing is a technology that restructures consciousness itself - enabling the kind of analytical, reflective thinking that oral cultures cannot sustain in the same way. His argument was explored in the Language theme and is worth returning to here: if writing is a technology, then every student in this room has already been profoundly shaped by a technology they almost never think about as a technology.

Ernest Braun, in From Need to Greed, traces how the role of technology in human life has changed over time. In early human history, technology served primarily to support survival - to address the needs of food, shelter, warmth, and protection.

In early human history, technology served primarily to support survival - to address the needs of food, shelter, warmth, and protection. Over centuries, and with accelerating speed from the Industrial Revolution onwards, technology became a commercial force: driven less by need than by the possibility of profit. New technologies arise, Braun argues, when a technical idea converges with a profitable market.

Consider: was the smartphone invented because people needed it, or because it was technically possible and commercially lucrative? Does the distinction matter for how we evaluate what it has done?

What is technology?
GreggU

A short video that does one useful thing: it separates technology from gadgets. Technology, the video argues, is a system of practical knowledge and problem-solving - the ideas behind the tools, not the tools themselves. The wheel is applied technology; the idea that circular motion around an axis solves a transport problem is the technology. Human language qualifies. The distinction matters for this page because it pushes back against the assumption that technology means devices - and opens the question of what else it might include.

Big idea 2 - The medium is the message.

The standard view of technology is that it is a neutral tool: a means to an end, shaped entirely by the uses to which humans put it. On this view, a knife is not good or evil - it depends on what you do with it. The internet is not harmful in itself - it depends on what people use it for. Technology, on this account, is like a pipe: what matters is what flows through it, not the pipe itself.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, thought this was almost entirely wrong. His claim - "the medium is the message" - is one of the most productive and counterintuitive ideas in twentieth-century thought. What McLuhan meant was that the technology through which a message travels - the type of pipe - does not leave the message untouched. It reshapes what can be said and how the mind that receives it works. The printing press created a new kind of reader - silent, solitary, linear - and a new conception of authorship, ownership, and individual thought. It standardised languages and undermined the authority of handwritten manuscripts; most dramatically, it made possible the Protestant Reformation - none of which Gutenberg intended or could have foreseen. The medium - the printed book - was the message, independent of any particular book's content.

The Medium is the Message/Massage
BBC Radio 4

A short BBC film on McLuhan's central idea - and on the typo that became a second argument. "The medium is the massage" was a printer's error that McLuhan kept because it said something true: media rub and reshape the people who use them. The film explains what "the medium is the message" actually means: not the content but the technology of transmission changes us. Print produced a visual, individual culture; oral cultures were shaped by the ear. McLuhan saw electronic media creating a global village even before the internet existed.

Television, on McLuhan's account, created a different relationship to knowledge from radio or print: fragmented, image-based, immediate, and resistant to the complex, sustained argument that print makes possible. Neil Postman extended this argument in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: if television is the dominant medium of public discourse, then public discourse will eventually come to resemble television - entertaining and structurally hostile to complexity. The medium shapes what can be said within it. Neil Postman had been highly critical of the way television dumbed things down in the 1970s and 80s. I often wonder what he would have thought about social media.

As you will have seen in our history lessons earlier this year, Marx had made a similar argument, from a different direction, in 1847. The historical mode of production - which includes its technology - produces not only goods but the social relations that surround their production. The watermill and the social relations of feudalism were aspects of the same system. When the steam engine arrived, it produced a new class structure - industrial capitalism - because the technology and the social formation are inseparable. Marx went further. The base - the economic and technological structure of a society - produces not only goods and class relations but the dominant ideas of the age.

What a society believes, what it counts as knowledge, what seems rational and natural and inevitable: these are, for Marx, products of the material conditions of production. 'The ruling ideas of each age,' he wrote, 'have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.' This is the argument you encountered with Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony in Core Lesson 4. Gramsci's insight was that ruling groups maintain power not only through force but by making their own worldview appear as universal common sense: natural, obvious, and not requiring justification. It applies with particular force to technology: when we ask whose interests a technology serves. You can explore this argument in more depth on my History website.

A more recent and challenging response to the idea of technology as a neutral tool comes from the American political theorist Langdon Winner. In his 1980 essay 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?', Winner argues that technology encodes social choices that were made before it was built. His most cited example is Robert Moses, the urban planner who designed much of New York's public infrastructure in the mid-twentieth century. Moses, according to Winner's account, had the bridges on the parkways leading to Long Island's public beaches built at a height that would allow cars to pass but not buses - and buses were the transport of poor and Black New Yorkers. The claim has been contested by later historians, but the structure of Winner's argument stands regardless: the decisions about what a technology will and will not do are social decisions, made by people with interests. They are there in the design before the artifact exists. And the artifact carries those decisions forward long after the people who made them are gone.

Big idea 3 - We are always inside our own blind spot.

We can return now to the Blade Runner question. The answer McLuhan and Marx together suggest is this: every generation imagines the future using the conceptual tools of the present, and those tools were produced by the technology the generation already has. 1982 could extrapolate flying cars because cars existed and flight existed. It could imagine genetic replicants because genetics was advancing. But the smartphone required a convergence - miniaturisation, cellular networks, GPS, touchscreen, internet - that no single existing technology pointed toward. The imaginative failure was structural: every generation imagines from inside the technology it already has.

Steven Johnson, in How We Got to Now, traces this pattern across centuries. Spectacle lenses, developed in the 1280s to correct failing eyesight, eventually produced the microscope and the telescope. Galileo used a telescope to challenge the geocentric model of the universe. The microscope revealed bacteria, which eventually produced germ theory and the entire apparatus of modern medicine. None of this was visible from the point of making the first pair of reading glasses. The person who ground that lens was solving an immediate practical problem. The chain of consequences required more than two centuries and the contributions of hundreds of people who could not see each other's work from where they stood. The technology did something nobody intended, because nobody could see far enough to intend it.

This pattern repeats. Gutenberg was a printer trying to produce Bibles more efficiently. He could not have imagined the Reformation or the concept of individual authorship - both of which the printing press eventually produced. The engineers who designed the internet as a resilient academic communication network could not have imagined social media or surveillance capitalism.

Neal Stephenson wrote the novel Snow Crash in 1992 as a satire of hypercapitalism - a warning about where corporate power and virtual reality were heading. Silicon Valley read it as a design document. Zuckerberg named his company after the metaverse Stephenson invented as a dystopia. The author wrote a warning. The engineers built the thing he warned against.

The novel depicts a hypercapitalist near-future in which the United States government has collapsed and corporate franchises have taken over the functions of the state. The Metaverse - a fully immersive virtual reality internet - is where people go to escape a degraded physical world. Stephenson intended this as satire. Tech founders read it as inspiration. Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta after Stephenson's concept. Multiple executives at Google and Oculus have cited it as formative.

The education dimension is the most immediate version of this question. Students today are the first generation to grow up entirely inside a smartphone-shaped world. The effects of that technology on attention, memory, social connection, and mental health are already visible in the data - Jonathan Haidt's research in The Anxious Generation documents them in detail. But the full consequences, the ones that will seem obvious to the generation after this one, are not yet visible. We are inside them. The Scope page cannot answer what the technology we are living inside is doing to knowledge and to knowers.

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation
CBS News

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that social media companies deliberately designed addictive platforms that harm children's mental health. Citing internal studies from Meta Platforms, he claims social media increases anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Haidt supports phone-free schools and stricter age limits on social media access. He warns that AI chatbots may deepen loneliness and weaken children's relationships with parents, arguing society must protect childhood through real-world play and reduced screen dependence.

Bringing it together

Why the payphone matters.

The three big ideas on this page converge on a single point. Technology is older and wider than the digital present (Big Idea 1), so any serious inquiry into what technology does must look at the full range of cases.

Technology actively shapes what its users can know and think (Big Idea 2), so the question of who builds technology and what assumptions are built in is always also a question about knowledge. And every generation is structurally unable to see what its own technology is doing (Big Idea 3), which means that the most important effects of any technology are typically the ones that arrive later and unexpectedly.

The payphone in Blade Runner is an image of all three ideas. The filmmakers imagined extraordinary things. This short film takes us behind the scenes with Tom Southwell the production designer responsible for many of the famous prop designs in the film.

Next: Optional Theme 2: Technology - Perspectives.

Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.

Questions to think about

If technology goes back 3.3 million years and includes fire, writing, and the clock, then the claim that "we live in a technological age" applies to every human generation in history. Does the phrase still mean anything? Or does it describe a real difference in the scale and speed of technological change?
Ong argued that writing restructures consciousness - that literate and oral minds are genuinely different. If this is true of writing, which humans have had for roughly 5,000 years, what might be true of the smartphone, which most teenagers have had for less than a decade?
McLuhan argued that the medium shapes the message regardless of content. If this is right, then the question "is social media good or bad?" is less useful than "what kind of knowledge and discourse does social media make possible - and what kind does it make impossible?" What would the answer be?
Marx's hand-mill and steam-mill argument makes the mode of production the fundamental driver of social relations. But Winner argues that technology encodes social relations that already exist. Is it possible that both are true simultaneously - that technology both reflects and reinforces the society that builds it?
Snow Crash was written as a warning and read as a blueprint. Is this a failure of the author, the readers, or the technology of the novel itself? Can fiction change how people think about technology, or does it only provide images that confirm what readers already want to build?
If we are always inside our own blind spot, is it possible to be deliberately cautious about the unintended consequences of a new technology? Or does caution always come too late - after the technology has already begun to do what we did not intend?
The first spectacle lenses were made to correct failing eyesight. The telescope was a consequence nobody imagined. If we cannot trace the chain of consequences from any new technology in advance, on what basis can we make ethical judgments about whether to develop it?

Exhibition connections
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here

It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.

Prompt #23: How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge?

Suggested object: any tool that both produces and shapes knowledge - a calculator, a search engine interface, a scientific instrument, a printing press, or even a hammer. The central argument is that tools transform the capabilities they appear to extend. A calculator produces a different kind of result for a different kind of knower than working through arithmetic by hand. A search engine ranks and personalises results, producing a different relationship to what counts as finding something out than a library does. The exhibition argument needs to show specifically what is different about knowledge produced through this tool, and what would change if the tool were absent.

Prompt #10: What challenges are raised by the dissemination and/or communication of knowledge?

Suggested object: a social media platform, a printing press, a radio, a newspaper, or any medium whose structure shapes what knowledge can circulate through it. McLuhan's argument is that every medium of communication carries an implicit epistemology: it makes certain kinds of knowledge easy to share and others structurally difficult. A tweet is a medium that rewards brevity and certainty; it is hostile to nuance and sustained argument. A printed book is a medium that rewards individual authorship and permanence; it is hostile to dialogue and rapid revision. The exhibition argument asks what kind of knowledge the medium makes possible and what kind it forecloses.

Prompt #33: How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?

Suggested object: any piece of knowledge whose current form bears the marks of the technology through which it was produced - a scientific paper, a textbook, a database, a Wikipedia article, a legal document. Johnson's argument in How We Got to Now is that the knowledge we currently have is always the residue of a chain of technological developments that nobody planned. Germ theory required the microscope; the microscope required lens-grinding technology developed for spectacles; the spectacles were made to correct individual eyesight. The exhibition argument asks what it means that the knowledge we have is partly a function of the tools we happened to develop - and what knowledge might look different, or not exist at all, if the chain had gone differently.

Feature films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott

You have already seen the edited extract at the top of this page. The full film is worth watching in its own right - not as a prediction of the future but as a document of what one generation of thinkers feared technology would produce. Los Angeles in 2019: the Tyrell Corporation has learned to manufacture human beings. The replicants are genetically engineered, built for labour, given implanted memories they believe are real.

When they go rogue, blade runners retire them. Watch for the Voight-Kampff test - a technology designed to detect whether something is human by measuring involuntary empathic response. Does it work? And if a machine could pass it, what would that mean? Watch also for what the technology has not fixed: the inequality, the smog, the crowded streets of people who will never leave Earth. The technology serves power, not people. That is the argument the film makes without stating it - and it is the argument the Perspectives page takes up. My students can access the film here

optional Theme - technology