Provocations on Technoskepticism
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by Jacob Pleasants, Dan Krutka, and Marie Heath
As part of the Civics of Technology project, some of us have been trying to figure out what we should teach students about technology in schools. Over time and in several articles, several of us—Dan Krutka, Marie Heath, Jacob Pleasants, Phil Nichols, and Scott Metzger—started to use the term technoskepticism to capture the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that might be necessary for students to critically interrogate technology and society.
It’s a concept we generally agree on, but are still wrestling with what it means. Dan and Marie have drawn on media ecology and critical theory to ground their understanding that neither technologies, nor societies, are neutral. They used this approach to inform the Civics of Technology project and much of their recent scholarship, but others in our community bring different shading to the framing of technoskepticism. For instance, Jacob’s point of entry lies in Science and Technology Studies as well as the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Engineering. The more we talk, the more we realize this concept is still emerging. Our current understanding of technoskepticism has been emerging for several years. For Marie and Dan, it began with work on technoethics and inquiring into the ethical implications of technology in education spaces. On our research page, you can find some of the articles where we’ve defined and utilized the technoskepticism term:
Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Mason, L. E. (2020). Technology won’t save us–A call for technoskepticism in social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1), 108-120.
Mason, L. E., Krutka, D. G., & Heath, M. K. (2021). The metaphor is the message: Limitations of the media literacy metaphor for social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 21(3), 770-780.
Krutka, D. G., Caines, A., Heath, M. K., & Staudt Willet, K. B. (2022). Black Mirror pedagogy: Dystopian stories for technoskeptical imaginations. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 11(1).
Krutka, D. G., Metzger, S. A., & Seitz, R. Z. (2022). “Technology inevitably involves trade-offs”: The framing of technology in social studies standards. Theory & Research in Social Education, 50(2), 226-254.
Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Smits, R. M. (2022). Toward a civics of technology. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 30(2), 229-237.
Krutka, D. G., Pleasants, J., & Nichols, T. P. (2023). Talking the technology talk. Phi Delta Kappan, 104(7), 42-46.
Metzger, S. M., & Krutka, D. G. (2023). Interrogating the smartphone: Teaching through technoskeptical questions. Social Education, 87(5), 313-318.
Other scholars have started to engage with the term in response to our Marie and Dan’s 2020 call as journal editors:
Hicks, D., Lisanti, M., & van Hover, S. (2020). Shifting the Gaze:(Mis) Using Actor-Network-Theory to Examine Preservice Teachers’ Uses of Digital Technologies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(4), 730-742.
Adams, E., Wurzburg, E., & Kerr, S. (2021). The tip of the iceberg: Immaterial labor, technoskepticism and the teaching profession. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 21(1), 126-154.
As part of the community of scholars involved in the Civics of Technology project, we contend that educators should cultivate a technoskepticism among students to ensure that we advance more educational, humane, and just futures. Developing a technoskeptical disposition (or practice, orientation, habits, outlooks) toward technology challenges us to slow down and think intentionally and critically about technology in our lives. Technoskepticism involves building knowledge about how technologies function, their complicated interactions with and effects on society, and how political decisions are made about their use and non-use. It also involves forming skills to think critically about technologies, imagining speculative futures, and taking just actions. Educators can teach technoskepticism, for example, explicitly through the use of our five technoskeptical questions and other curriculum, or implicitly through small actions and critical questioning about technology in and out of schools.
In some ways, maybe we’ve been better at defining technoskepticism by what it’s not. We seek to reject grand or master narratives around technological progress. We agree that discussions of technology are complex and complicated. Answers are rarely simple, or agreed upon. We are still wrestling with a lot of questions. What is the function of the skepticism in technoskepticism? Should we focus on technologies, or the stories and narratives we tell about technologies? Is technoskepticism more than a cost/benefit analysis? As an example of our thinking, Jacob addresses this last question more thoroughly.
Avoiding False Dichotomies
In developing this idea, we have consistently worked to differentiate technoskepticism from techno-pessimism. Discourse about technology too often establishes false binaries. On one side of the binary are the techno-optimists, the boosters who trumpet the benefits that new technologies will bring and the problems they will solve. These are the people who tell us that, for instance, autonomous vehicles will bring about a far safer and more efficient future of transportation. They haven’t yet been perfected, but rest assured: autonomous vehicles are the future. Pitted against the optimists are the naysayers who relentlessly criticize novel technologies. They speak of autonomous vehicles as a ludicrous pipe dream that will bring only embarrassing failures. Or worse yet, they will end up displacing millions of people who earn their livelihood from driving. Does technoskepticism align itself with these naysayers?
This is a challenging issue. On the one hand, technoskepticism does mean pushing against the kind of techno-solutionist rhetoric that is so pervasive in our society. And that does mean examining the unintended harms and potential losses that occur when adopting new technologies. That kind of analysis is necessary when taking a stance that is skeptical of boosterist claims about technological futures. But to be against techno-solutionism does not mean that one needs to be against technology! The goal of technoskeptical thinking is not to show all of the ways that technologies are bad but the ways that technologies are complicated.
We wrestle with the fact, though, that “skepticism” often connotes a negative and pessimistic stance. How can we convey that our aim is to tell complicated stories rather than pessimistic or negative ones?
Another dichotomy that we seek to avoid is the ostensible division between humans and technology. Extreme versions of this divide are evident in the discourse of the AI doomers, who speak of a future where sentient robots will seek to usurp their human creators. But it is a perspective that is not just limited to the speculations of futurists or science fiction writers. We often speak of and think about technologies as if they are tools that exist apart from humans, that “work” in predetermined ways and just “do what they do.” Whether beneficial or adversarial, this is an artificial separation that often leads to problematic reasoning. Human life is fundamentally technological (one reason why an “anti-technology” stance is so absurd!), and technologies “do” little apart from the human cultures in which they are created and used.
These points, of course, underlie our assertion that, “Technologies are not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced.” When we observe technologies that seem to promote human flourishing, or ones that seem to degrade human dignity and autonomy, we must always remember that those outcomes cannot be attributed to the technologies-in-themselves. Those effects emerge from the interactions of social and technical systems. The concerns we raise about, say, facial recognition technologies come from an awareness of how those technical capabilities would be deployed by carceral institutions or malicious individuals against those who are most vulnerable in our society. The harms of facial recognition thus arise from the ways in which it interacts with existing social (and technical) structures and systems, particularly systems of oppression, surveillance, and control.
Does that mean that facial recognition is neither good nor bad and that “it all depends on how it is used?” Again, the answer is no! The very question implies that facial recognition can be thought about in isolation, removed from its sociocultural context. Thinking about technology in such a way leads not just to problematic conclusions but to lousy questions. Technoskepticism, we assert, is about asking better questions!
As we continue to refine and clarify what it means to move toward technoskepticism as an aim of education, how would you define technoskepticism?