Interactivity : Thoughts on Joseph Weizenbaum’s “On Tools”

This reading is an organized and methodical analysis of tools beginning with the need for man’s imagining of the tool through to the way our world changes from the introduction of these tools.  Here are some key points from the text:

• “Man can create little without first imagining that he can create it.” p.18
• “[Tools] symbolize the actions they enable.” p.18
• Inventions such as the six-shooter, ships, the printing press, and the cotton-picking machine changed the world as they became an extension of the human body, making it more power and enabling more control on its environment.  “[The tools] signify that man, the engineer, can transcend limitations imposed on him by the puniness of his body and of his senses.” p.20
• The introduction of the idea of time and the clock was the introduction of an autonomous machine based on the planetary system.  Man no longer looked to the sun to know when to rise or when to sleep, but rather looked to the clock face.  “This rejection of direct experience was to become one of the principal characteristics of modern science.” p.25
• Creating new tools can unalterably affect our world.  There is an element of risk involved in such a change.  “‘Every thinker,’ John Dewey wrote, ‘puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril so no one can predict what will emerge in its plasce.’ So too does everyone who invents a new tool or, what amounts to the same thing, finds a new use for an old one.” p.26
• Modern tools are changing our world at a much faster rate.  “Later tools, e.g., the telephone, the automobile, radio, impinged on a culture already enthralled by what economists call the pig principle: if something is good, more is better.  The hunger for more communication capacity and more speed, often stimulated by the new devices themselves, as well by new marketing techniques associated with them, enabled their rapid spread throughout society and society’s increasingly rapid transformation under their influence.” p.27
• It is beyond our imagination that the systems of a World War or the development of an Atomic Bomb could have happened without the computation abilities of a computer.  Weisenbaum believes that although we think that the industries of past decades would have imploded without the introduction of the computer that is not necessarily the case.  However, he does go on to say, “the belief in the indispensability of the computer is not entirely mistaken.  The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure.