Institutionalized, Invisible: Comparing Technology & Modern Racism-Part I

“ ‘We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value’” (11). Marshall McLuhan quotes General David Sarnoff here only to mock him, believing Sarnoff “ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media” (11). But the argument here is far from simple; it is the struggle between technological determinism and a more laissez faire, nonjudgmental approach (the latter embodied in Sarnoff). In other words, we are wondering if a subtle societal feature (its choice of media) assiduously contributes to collective problems. Sound familiar? This dynamic of media influence, although not identical by any stretch of the imagination, is reminiscent of modern, institutionalized racism in its invisibility, its ingrained nature into the fabric of society, and most importantly, its subsequent power to be a silent killer. This reading response will use this unlikely connection to explore the murky polemics surrounding media’s influence on society, focusing on how the racial history (particularly that of oppression) is like new media in that both are seen to either completely determine or, conversely, have no effect on the current social situation.
Technological determinism is one extreme. It suggests that, as we said in class, that “the invention of new technology determines the uses to which it will be put, and thus the social structures that might result from it.” In this view, technology is a scapegoat for societal problems, lifting culpability from the true perpetrators. It is not considered that human imagination and desire created technology to achieve their own ends, only in a more efficient manner. This, in some ways, is what Friedrich Kittler was trying to express in saying that “numbers and figures become (in spite of romanticism) the key to all creatures” (118). Technological determinism is very strictly defined, and its rigidity does not allow for the variety of perspectives and experiences that shape the human experience.
We can roughly equate this to the equally deterministic statement that past historical oppression of minorities has condemned these same minorities to forever experience deficiencies in their rights and ability to reach the “American dream.” Like technological determinism, this is a restricted view that, while not entirely wrong, cannot look beyond its premise to view the opportunities and progress of the present age.
At the other end of the spectrum, is Sarnoff’s dismissive laissez faire attitude that claims impunity for all technology, attributing societal problems to the uses people have created for that technology. The appropriate correlation within the question of racism is the similarly dismissive position that racial history, like technology in the past example, has no bearing on racial inequality, that it is rather the ways that people have used, or taken advantage, of that history as a “victim race” seeking to mooch off the government that leads to the current race-based stratification in the modern United States.
Clearly both technological/historical determinism and the equally ludicrous disregard for institutional influences in assessing problems, are narrow-minded and lacking in extensive consideration; through the comparison of technology and racial history, we see that the folly of absolutist thinking is a human tendency, natural yet ineffective in accurately representing a problematic situation.

The interesting (and challenging) part comes in finding a perspective that simultaneously acknowledges the power of the institutionalized mindset resulting from both new media and from historical discrimination, while also taking into account the efficacy of each individual and society as a whole. (I will discuss this at length in my next blog.)