Nature or technology: do we have to choose?

This video for edcmooc makes me think that technology and culture are not independent and that technology versus nature is a false dichotomy.

Starting with the later - ever wanted to be naked in all sorts of weather? Guess what, doesn't work for us. My dog sheds fur when it gets hot and shed it again to get his winter coat (come to think of it, Labradors shed all of the time). Me, I change clothes. We don't sleep under the stars all of the time as getting soaked or freezing to death is not good - so technology at its simplest level shields us from nature to the extent that it protects us for much of the time against the negative impacts.

If we view technology from an essentialist viewpoint, then this dystopic video says that technology necessarily makes us more or less blind to the natural world around us - except where it either causes us hardship (think fireants in the US as more likely to cause blackouts than birds) or where we cause them hardship (I think from memory collisions with windows kill far more birds than windfarms). While a window shields us from heat, cold and rain, it need not shield us from nature. So does technology in of itself hide nature from us? Perhaps the more we embrace technology in and of itself rather than how it aids and protects us, that we hide behind our phones and can't see the birds around us (so long as the phones don't stop us from seeing the people in front of us at least it connects us) and we travel into space merely to look down on ourselves (technology as narcissism).

Make sure you take the opportunity today to look up from your phone or computer screen and look out of the window before a power outage forces you to.

Technology as emergent

Having just started for the MOOC Edcmooc (E-learning and digital cultures) today, I've been reading about technological determinism and the essentialism some people view technology as having - either democratizing or anti-demoncritizing for example, and the inherent dualism between society and culture on the one hand, and technology on the other. Do digital cultures in and of themselves have a teleology, a direction in which they point.

A book worthy of reading (though I don't buy into all of the metaphysical assumptions) is Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the sacred. Here, he examines the idea of emergence - the appearance of something genuinely new that could not have readily been predicted or simulated from is component parts (epistemological emergence) and therefore partially lawless and new (ontological emergence).

He gives the example of the tractor. How can you take a huge engine and produce a stable vehicle? Simple, make the engine block the chassis. But who would have thought ahead of time an engine block could serve as a chassis anymore than evolution could have suggested a fish swim bladder would become a pair of lungs?

The point is that given the complexity of the interplay between 'pure technology' and culture, the various histories that form internet technologies and the competing hegemonies and interests, what is has emerged from what was and what will be can only be partially known now. So what will we bring to the table from the cultural/worldview end that will shape digital cultures and elearning for the better?