Language, Texts, and Technology
Language and Technology
Much of our focus throughout the rest of this class will be on how we use various technologies to write and read with. This week we ask more foundational questions about the connection between technology and language. In what ways are our abilities to use a language and our abilities to use technologies related to one another? Are language use and tool use just different expressions of the same deeper cognitive functions, or would it have been possible for humans to have developed one without the other.
Our first reading, “The complementation theory of language and tool use,” offers one possible approach to these questions. Reynolds points to both the communal nature of tool use/creation and similarity between of the cognitive functions involved in arranging the tasks and objects needed to create a tool and the arranging of thoughts and signs required to utter a sentence. Other accounts of the cognitive relationship between language and technology can be found in the suggested reading section.
In the second reading Stephen Kline identifies four different ways that we use the term “technology”. These are:
- Hardware (or artifacts)
- Sociotechnical System of Manufacture – This includes everything that is needed to created a certain type of hardware. For example, a part of the SSM of bicycles includes the tools, products, people, and systems required to manufacture tires.
- The information and skills needed to accomplish a task.
- Sociotechnical System of Use – This may be the most important for our purposes. SSU includes all of the hardware, infrastructure, technical systems, and societal systems that develop around the use of an artifact. Returning to the bicycle example, the SSU for this device includes helmets, bike paths, laws regulating bicycle use, and bike messenger companies.
One other important question to consider through both of this week’s readings will whether not language is itself a technology. Think about how the ideas about language and technology relate to your understanding of language and to those expressed in our earlier readings.
Readings
“The complementation theory of language and tool use” / Peter Reynolds / Handout
“What is Technology” / Stephen Kline /
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