“The concept of function strips technology bare of values and social contexts, focusing engineers and managers on just what they need to know to do their jobs. Technology emerges from this striptease as a pure instance of contrived causal interaction. To reduce technology to a device and the device to the laws of its operation is somehow obvious, but it is a typical fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Just as the parts of a clockwork mechanism lack true independence as such, even though they can be disassembled and identified as separate things, so technologies are not truly independent of the social world. That world is not merely an external environment; it traverses them with meaning.”


The actual usages of communication technologies are ‘doubled’ in a particular way. Technology implementation involves “primary and secondary instrumentalizations” (Feenberg, 2000, p. 304 ff.) that occur in close conjunction with each other. These two levels of instrumentalization are required to “realize” (see Radder, 1996, p. 1 ff.) communications technologically, i.e., to turn a communication plan into an organizational -- in this case, an educational -- actuality.

Primary instrumentalization is a typifying or formalizing movement that establishes the specifically “technical” aspect of communications. Here, input-output calculations and procedures are used to direct communication towards specified ends, which are developed according to generalized standards of efficiency and effectiveness.  This primary movement distinguishes technologized communications from other material embodiments of communication – aesthetic objects or interpersonal interactions, for example – that lack the precision and control that are important aspects of advanced technology use. The “programming” (see Beniger, 1986, pp. 39-40; also Couch, 1996, p. 22) of input-output procedures associated with primary instrumentalization may be precisely calibrated and the standards defined in terms of strict control mechanisms, or they may be more vernacular and flexible. In either case, the foundationally technical character of the communications is established though this primary instrumentalizing moment. In both the more technical and more vernacular modes of technological usage, primary instrumentalization tends towards the exercise of specialized, disciplinary, expert control and management.

Secondary instrumentalization is “realization of the constituted objects and subjects in actual technical networks and devices” (Feenberg, 2000, p. 306). Here, technical devices are situated, by and along with their users, in the socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts of everyday life experience, or the lifeworld (see Schutz and Luckmann, 1973, passim). Again, the contexts in question may be predominantly technological in orientation and values, or directed towards other, qualitative pursuits, such as artistic or educational activities. This secondary, instrumentalizing of technologized communications inclines towards popular and personal expressions of their significance, rather than strictly disciplinary expressions, which predominate in primary instrumentalization.

Both moments of instrumentalization reveal technologized communications to be instrumentally directed systems that must, at a minimum, serve to reproduce the basic conditions of their own functioning. The technology must continuously be reestablished as reliably usable on the basis of the same techniques and procedures that applied to prior instances of use. This “autopoietic” (Luhmann, 1989, p. 143) – i.e., self-organizing, self-reproducing -- dimension means that technologized communications remain foundationally technical and functional – at least in terms of contributing to the conditions of their own reproduction as usable tools -- even as they take on other qualities and roles in non-technical areas. In cultures and eras that are distinctively oriented towards technological values and activities -- such as the contemporary post-industrial world and the technology-oriented educational environment -- the predominance of the technical element may be routinely accentuated.

This emphasis on the technological encouraged me to complete an article that considers the contemporary city – what I label as the technologized city – as an example of technologized communications. The main thrust of the article is to suggest how cities communicate and how citizens communicate through cities as a distinctive type of ‘medium’ for collective life. The article is soon to be published in a journal titled Cultural Studies            Critical Methodologies.

I cite this project in order to suggest the kinds of outgrowth of involvements with technology that MITTEN participants may have and that would be valuable for fellow participants to perhaps have the opportunity to consider. My intention is to encourage current participants to reflect on the kinds of broader thinking they have done about technology and to consider how such efforts might usefully contribute to the MITTEN initiative. One year, or more, of participation is a time frame during which participants are likely to expand their involvement with technology in theoretical terms as well as instrumental terms. MITTEN might significantly enrich its offerings by drawing on some of the resulting resources in a more conscious and systematic manner.