On Technology Criticism and its Reception

A quote from the preface to Langdon Winner's classic book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986):

[T]his is a work of criticism.  If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand that the underlying purpose is positive.  A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text.  In a similar way, critics of music, theater, and the arts have a valuable, well-established role, serving as a helpful bridge between artists and audiences.  Criticism of technology, however, is not yet afforded the same glad welcome.  Writers who venture beyond the most pedstrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technical forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely "antitechnology" or "blaming technology."  All who have recently stepped forward as critics in this realm have been tarred with the same idiot brush, an expression of the desire to stop a much needed dialogue rather than enlarge it.  If any readers want to see the present work as antitechnology," make the most of it.  That is their topic, not mine.

Twenty years later, the situation is hardly any better.

... I should add, though, that the analogy Winner makes here is perhaps imperfect -- it depends on how you define technology, which is tougher than it sounds.  I may expand on this topic later (not much time for blogging lately).