Beginning the year with the Technological Quote Activity
Civics of Tech Announcements
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 09/03/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
September Book Club: For our next book club we will read Ashley Shew’s 2023 book, Against Technoableism Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. We will meet at 8pm EDT on Thursday, September 12th, 2024. You can register on our events page.
by Dan Krutka
For many members of our community, a new academic school year is beginning. At Civics of Tech, we have a variety of curriculum resources that you can find on our Curriculum page. Some of the resources include our technoskeptical questions and Iceberg that can frame your approach to teaching students about technology. We have edtech audits and unfolding a smartphone activities. For social studies teachers in particular, we have a Luddite, More Work for Mother, and Lewis Latimer electric light inquiries.
But maybe our most popular beginning-of-the-year activity is our Technology Quotes Activity. Here’s how we introduce the activity on the page:
The technology quotes activity was created as an introductory activity to encourage people to consider critical interpretations of technology that go beyond simply seeing technology as tools that always result in social progress. Educators can use all the quotes in full, choose some, or use simplified quotes. The Google slides linked below are intended to be printed out and posted on classroom walls for a “gallery walk,” but teachers can adapt the activity for their contexts.
We have continued adding quotes to this page as our community shares new ones with us. Only the quotes we have used in the classroom appear in the slides, but of course, it is easy to modify the slides to include different quotes. Please continue to check back for updates.
If you have not checked the page recently, here are some of the newer quotes we’ve added to the page:
Machines… are an extension of their inventor-creators. That is not simple once you think. Machines, the entire technology of the West, is just that, the technology of the West. Nothing has to look or function the way it does. The West man’s freedom, unscientifically got at the expense of the rest of the world’s people, has allowed him to xpand his mind–spread his sensibility wherever it cdgo, & so shaped the world, & its powerful artifact-engines.
— Amiri Baraka (writer), ”Technology and Ethos," 1969
Technological development has come to be viewed as an autonomous thing, beyond politics and society, with a destiny of its own which must become our destiny too.
— David Noble (Historian), Progress without People, 1995
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
— Paul Virilio (French Philosopher), Politics of the Very Worst, p. 89, 1999
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
— Wendell Berry (Environmental Activist & Farmer), “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” 2000
If the experience of modern society shows us anything, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.”
— Langdon Winner (Science and Technology Studies Professor), “Technology as a Form of Life,‘“ p. 105, 2004
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
— Ursula K. Le Guin (science fiction writer), “A Rant About ‘Technology,” 2005
The power of our ‘mental’ tools is amplified by the power of our ‘metal’ tools.
— Jeannette Wing (Computer Science Professor), “Computational Thinking and Thinking about Computing,” 2008
Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, the mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Guiding this was a perception of technology that feasted on the felling of forests and the extraction of resources. The mythology that powered the Age of Industrialization distanced itself from natural systems, favoring fuel by fire. Today, the legacy of this mythology haunts us.
— Julia Watson (Designer), The Power of Lo-TEK, 2019
It’s the same story, time and again: Technology that promises to alleviate work degrades it instead.
— Brian Merchant (Technology Journalist), Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, p. 315, 2023
Technochauvinism is a kind of bias that considers computational solutions superior to all other solutions.
— Meredith Broussard (data journalism professor), More than a glitch, 2023, p. 2
Which quote is your favorite? What other quotes should we add? Please share any new ones in the comments section, and we’d love to hear if you use this activity in your classroom! For all you educators, we hope your year is filled with critical technological lessons and conversations that can help us move toward more humane and just futures!