To return to themes of the first chapter, perhaps our most common or most shared experience of technology is as an agent of change, that is, as an external prod to our normal or routine ways of doing things. Indeed, it was largely in order to capture this role that the term technology became a keyword in social theory. Moreover, it is perhaps understandable that so many accounts of technology, at least until recently, have attempted to analyse or explain this experience in terms of the apparent inevitability of such changes and as part of some more general evaluation (moral, ethical, etc.,) of the implications of the actual changes technology introduces. The main motivation of this chapter is the belief that although these issues are as relevant today as they have ever been, they have recently fallen out of favour largely because of the way they have been formulated in earlier accounts. Specifically, various attempts to address these issues have been interpreted, often understandably, as a form of technological determinism. Given the implausibility of any form of determinism, including its technological variant, accounts that might be labelled as such have tended to be dismissed or ignored.

Linked to this dismissal of technological determinism has been an implicit acceptance of some kind of technological neutrality or instrumentalism. Here, technology is viewed as neutral or instrumental in the sense that any implications that follow from the introduction of some particular technology take the form that they do simply because of the particular context or manner in which they are applied. There is, then, nothing of interest that can be said about the properties or characteristics of technology itself, or in general.

In this chapter, I argue that in dismissing accounts typically labelled as technological determinist and at least implicitly embracing a form of technological neutrality, recent contributions have lost sight of some of the important questions concerning technology, as well as some of the conceptual resources that might be used to answer such questions. At the very least, the aim of this chapter is to put such issues back on the agenda, although in rather different terms to those usually employed.