Notes on Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society"

Dr. Ellul is regarded by some as an academic neo-Ludite (though that may be somewhat strong).  However, from your reading above, you can see that his viewpoint on techology was pessimistic, to say the least.

He viewed techology  as an irresistible force - and "technique" is his terminology for "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity."  It's characteristics are:

1) Rationality (aspects of management such as standardization, division of labor, and quality control)
2) Artificiality (technique creates an artificial world, denying and eliminating the natural world)
3) Automatism of Technical Choice (the human has no role to play - technique acts and people observe)
4) Self-augmentation (It changes and evolves with no help or direct intervention by people)
5) Monism (it forms a single whole and its various components are self-reinforcing)
6) Technical Universalist (it has been made geographically widespread through commerce - it has qualitatively taken over the whole of civilization)
7) The Autonomy of Technique (consider an industrial plant as a closed system that is independent of the goals and needs of society in which it exists).

Here are some important criticisms of computers by neo-Luddites (from Baase, 1997)

• Computers cause massive unemployment and deskilling of jobs
• Computers "manufacture needs"
• Computers cause social inequity and social disintegration
• Computers separate humans from nature and destroy the environment
• Computers are dehumanizing
• Computers benefit big business and big government most
• Use of computers in schools will thwart development of social skills, human values, and intellectual skills in children.  They will create an "ominous uniformity of knowledge" consistent with corporate values
• Computers do little or nothing to solve real human problems.