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Meaning in Technology

by Arnold Pacey
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. 2001.
264 pp., 3 illus., $17.95 paper.
ISBN: 0-262-66120-9.
Reviewed by Elisa Giaccardi, Via Ciro Menotti 12, 12051 Alba (CN), Italy.
E-mail: elisa.giaccardi@fitzcarraldo.it


Can technology take a 'middle way' enabling it to avoid scientific reductionism and be effectively people-centered? Which role can history and philosophy of technology play within this process? What's the key to the activation of such a process? Arnold Pacey's Meaning in Technology grounds on these fundamental questions and identifies keywords like: experience, purpose, participatory approach, dimensions of knowledge.

Pacey's book appeals to all people moved in their research or practice by the urgency - highly contemporary - of delineating methods and concepts for a 'middle way' which can be followed. For such a reason, the book has a place within the contemporary epistemological inquiry regarding the inadequacy of the traditional scientific model and the sustainability of alternative methods. But this book can also be appealing to people (politicians or designers) aware or questioning themselves about the ethical responsibility of a reflective practice in technology.

Although the difficulty of the argument, given by the many and broad topics Pacey covers and by the more linear contents and structures than we are accustomed to, Meaning in Technology is a daring and exciting book, built on powerful connections and associations, enlightening metaphors, quotations and samples even from art, literature, and poetry. Its rigour is evident in Pacey's intellectual effort to take stock, to lead back frequently and in a clear way to the issue and to the general structure of the work.

According to Pacey, there are different dimensions of technology practice and experience that coexist and interact: political meanings and organizations, social and cultural meanings, technical knowledge, and personal experience. Ideally located at the vertexes of a tetrahedron, these different dimensions are in fact different and complementary levels of knowledge.

In Meaning in Technology, Pacey deals with subjectivity and focuses on the dimension of personal experience. He moves from an affirmative and 'context-based' standpoint that, throughout the book, will lead him to ask 'what it feels like': what the direct experience and practice of technology feels like for practitioners and consumers (in the first part of the book), and what it feels like in relation to the natural environment and in the context of relations among people (in the second part of the book). His standpoint aims to avoid explaining experience in terms of mental processes, as well as aiming to avoid reducing it in causal terms (both internal and external). Instead Pacey's adopted standpoint explains experience 'just as experience', and to understand its complexity without devaluing it in the 'merely subjective'.

Such a position leads the author to take into account human responses to technology, human experience of affective and sensorial responses 'concerned with purpose, aspiration, and relationships'. In Meaning of Technology, the explanatory shift from a mechanical model of cause-effect to a more complex notion of 'purposiveness' is exemplified by the musical metaphor. Music, he argues, shows well the 'inner flow of life', 'an element of the spontaneous and the purposive', or - in Kantian terms - a 'purposiveness without purpose' human behaviour (for instance in play and creativity) shares with nature, but not with machines.

In the first part of the book, Pacey analyses the direct experience of technology by craft workers, engineers, mathematicians, and consumers, and the singing or body rhythms as a source of technology. He examines visual thinking, 'tacit knowledge', and the emerging of multilayered social meanings. All these illustrate 'different experiences of purposiveness'. In the second part of the book, Pacey's analysis of the contexts in which technology is used leads us to explore our 'sense of place', our social and environmental relationships, issues concerned with biological involvement, gender and creativity. He argues that technology is part of a nature more 'subtle' than the one mechanical model can understand, that a 'detached way of thinking' is not always possible, and that to adopt a 'participatory approach' is often better. Thus, in the final part of his book - provocatively entitled The Missed Opportunity? - he concludes that if we wish an effective people-centered technology, some obstacles must be overcome. They are the habit of 'compartmentalized thinking' and object-centered interests, and their manifestations like 'technological distancing' and 'compulsive technology'. These obstacles must be overcome in favour of people-centered sensitivities like empathy, compassion, and a cherishing attitude. In the final chapter, Pacey coherently advocates an ethical view of how technology should be used, claiming - as historian and philosopher of technology - to identify the paradigms or conceptual models on which technology is based, and to acknowledge the meaning of human experience.

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Updated 7 September 2001.




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