Below I've included some snippets from my lecture on the Instrumental Theory of Technology from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

Last lecture we discussed the "Substantive critique of technology," the view that technology creates a frame of mind, a way of thinking about the world, that displaces any other way of thinking. More so than other ways of thinking, the technological way sweeps all before it. According to these critiques, the technological frame insists that it is the best (and hence it insists on being the only) way of thinking about the world. Technology thus becomes an end in itself rather than as a means to other, more substantive ends.

This type of critique of technology—as a frame of mind that is colonizing all aspects of life—still has its adherents. Albert Borgmann, for instance, in his Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, maintains this tradition of technology critique. Technology "is the rule today in constituting the inconspicuous pattern by which we normally orient ourselves."  To break free of technology as end-in-itself, Borgmann claims we need to reorient ourselves to "focal things and practices," such as music, enjoying the wilderness, gardening, gourmet meals with friends and family, the arts of conversation, running, and all other activities which pertain to history or which engage the body and mind in non-technological ways.

If technology induces a technological frame-of-mind by which we interpret all of reality according to its dictates, then the computer seems a most dangerous thing indeed. The computer thus appears to be the logical culmination of Gestell or of Zweckrationalitat. As Andrew Feenburg observed, "The computer's structure bears an ominous resemblance to mechanistic rationalization,"  a fact that also worried the earlier generation of technology critics.  In order to use the computer, we are forced into a way of thinking; we are forced to "think like the computer." That is, in order to effectively use it, we must break down problems into discrete smaller problems.

I once had a job interview with Microsoft, the world's largest software company, an event that made this aspect of computer usage quite real to me. Rather than asking me the usual interview questions about my education and work experience, the interviewer gave me a pad of paper and asked me to quickly write out in natural language the steps necessary to solve various problems (e.g., describe the five steps you would take to sort a series of numbers in reverse order, describe a six-step algorithm to separate an odd-sized block from a pile of similar-sized blocks). My character or history was totally irrelevant; what counted was my ability to quickly solve problems using a linear, dicotomizing methodology. (By the way, I did not get the job).

Using the computer does require a certain mental discipline, a way of thinking about the world that does seem to resemble mechanistic rationalism. Why, to return to the question of this dissertation, is there then such optimism about the computer? Has the one-dimensional society feared by Marcuse and others colonized us so completely that we are unable to recognize the chains that bind us? Is computer utopianism merely then the ideological message fed to us by the masters of the one-dimensional society? Unfortunately, this approach to computer utopianism does leaves a puzzling problem unanswered. Why is computer utopianism predominately an American phenomenon? Perhaps the United States has been more thoroughly transformed into the one-dimensional society. Perhaps. Or perhaps there is something a bit too totalizing about the substantive critique ...

Let's instead turn now to an alternative way of thinking about technology which we shall call the instrumental theory of technology. This view might also be called the "common sense" approach since it more closely matches the way most people view technology. In this view, technology is neutral. That is, any given technology is simply a tool without any normative content (i.e., it doesn't imply any type of political or economic or moral system).

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people"

"The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used."

Is this true then for all technologies? ...