Technological determinism has shady overtones, unsettling images of technology running the show and telling us what we need. When Epley said that determinism was the “black sheep” of communication technology study for this reason, my mind jumped to the exaggerated content of science fiction and horror movies. One in particular: Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. In the first, maybe, 10 minutes appliances and electronic devices all over a certain region just came alive – all on their own, for no apparent reason. For about two solid hours, a group of survivors are terrorized by semi-trucks that have come to life and are circling a gas station. And all the while I was reading the initial research in the Gillespie article, the only thing I could think of was technology having a mind of its own, having an agenda. It was extremely unsettling to read about studying “their” political valences in reference to technologies or software. It is one thing to give an inanimate object anthropomorphic attributes, (like the “lieutenants” Latour mentions) but to say a technology is “picking and choosing among human practices according to a veiled agenda” – was disconcerting to me. Gillespie does mention the designer as a potential source of the agenda or valence, but continues to use human pronouns in reference to a technology or software. At least in the Stephen King movie, the appliances were triggered to animation due to a comet passing in the Earth’s atmosphere. After reading this article, I am definitely of the symptomatic school of thought when it comes to technology and society interacting.
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In my own education, I always got stuck on the idea of what it means for a machine (or, for that matter, "a technology") to have "agency." Can there be non-human agency? I sort of get it better when I think of the question in these terms: can a machine encode power relations that was not intended by its creator? Well, yes, just like Gillespi's bridge. A technology, therefore, is always the articulation of the machine and the social, so it always contains power relations. Even if we don't want to say a technology makes choices, we can probably agree that a technology "discriminates."
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