Ultimately Irresponsible

Often new technologies are faced by useless technophobic or technophiles approaches. This is basically the cornerstone of Morozov first book, re-enforcing an idea that have been around long time since Frankenstein and luddism.
A good way to avoid such drastic approaches, showing the multifaced aspects of a technology, is showing the basic human drives underlying any object. To analyze the ontologic status of the object itself is not always the best way, sometimes the history of the different objects that shared the same use is as useful. A good example can be Caillois study of games: not focusing on the toys themselves, but on the psychological attitudes that the games showed. State lottery, stock market and gambling all rely on human attitude to devolve our fate to luck or chance. Meritocratic institutions or sports, and their instruments, embody human will of putting a set of rules to ones actions in order to leave space to competition and skills. A kind of sense of fairness moves societies toward these latter forms. Caillois theory is much more complicated than that, but it shows the point.
A closer technological example can show the same. Gutenberg invention of the printed press is worldwide example of widespread mass literacy. As Scott D.N. Cook showed mass literacy actually showed up in 20th century (still not reached 100% yet), while long before 1455 literacy was more common in other societies through other medias, think of arab or jewish communities (I stick to Cook’s article, don’t know if any book proves or denies it). Pulling aside the media and their form, the basic human need was communication in different times and spaces.
Gutenberg invention linked to mass literacy is a myth, exactly as regarding internet as linked to democracy. Every technology or system of technologies can have a variety of uses, only the history of uses can tell, only by studying these we’ll know the effects of a technology.
I guess even linking Tinder to a sexually frivolous attitude is a myth.
Too far? I think not.
Actually a Slate article by Amanda Hess stays, in my mind, on this track. Not letting us drive by what we think an object is, but looking at the human uses behind it and which other technical objects had the same use even with a different purpose. People always flirted, had random sex, fooled around and made fun of each other since ages, with different technologies enabling that. This is what this article shows, basic human motives are still there crossing the physical boundaries of different media. Still we keep on linking an object to a specific social effect as if it was its only purpose.
“We developed an implicit characterization of technological revolutions that consistently results in alarmingly faulty histories and a posture toward current technologies that is frighteningly misleading and ultimately irresponsible”.