Technological Empowerment

What does technological empowerment mean to me? It means being able to modify and adjust technology to work for me and not the other way around. After watching a very interesting Ted Talk , it dawned on me what angle I wanted to push in this blog entry.  I still take the stance that “Yes I feel very empowered by technology”. One of the hardest things for me to do is to “stop thinking about technology as a thing (or group of things) of some sort and, instead, view what we call "technology" as a set of socio-cultural practices” (Bradley). For so many years when I hear the word technology the first thing that comes to mind is an immediate technological device.

When I think about the idea of personal freedom and how the empowerment of the individual reduces that of the state (Barbook and Cameron, 53), I can draw clear connections to Clay Shirky’s Ted Talk. He talks about how democracies can learn from open source programming. The idea that programs should be shared and accessed by all, allowing individuals to change and modify them. The connection is made as to how the government can adapt a principle similar to this by allowing collaborative input from individuals in decision-making processes. Imagine this, a collaborative network where individuals can create laws, others can come in and modify them till it meets their desires. Now you can immediately imagine the ramifications of such a thing. There are all kinds of implications that apply, other than the fact that the more people giving input the longer and harder it is to come to an agreements.

 I thought I might take a different approach on this and look at technological empowerment from a programmer’s perspective. As a programmer you have total control of the technology, you have the ability to write programs that can do anything you want them to do; Programs are the forefront of majority, if not all of modern day technology. In line with my earlier description of what technological empowerment means to me, this exemplifies that to the highest degree. On the other hand one must also understand the limitations of this. There is an enormously small community, of people who have this kind of power – people who understand and know how to write computer programs – in comparison to the overall population.