Smith, Merritt Roe. 1994. "Technological Determinism in American Culture." Pp. 1-35 in Does Technology Drive History?, edited by Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Technological determinism affirms that changes in technology exert a greater influence on societies and processes than any other factor. One academic sees it as more important than international politics, maldistribution of wealth, gender or class differences, etc. The soft view sees it as strong but responding to social pressures, the hard view does not.

Determinism took root when people attributed agency to technology. It the 18th century the notion of progress was developed (the steady moral and material improvement). It is the use of science in the pursuit of human betterment.

Tench Coxe was one of the early ones who gave agency to technology. Factory manufacturing would lead to economic independence for the new America. Thomas Jefferson saw technology as a means to spiritual betterment, while Coxe saw it as creating societal benefit, especially the establishment of an orderly economy.

In general people hailed the new technologies as "the progress of the age". Technological innovation seem to guarantee progress. The belief that technological developments determine the course of human events was dogma by the end of the 19th century. Technologies were seen as instruments of power and symbols of human progress.

By 1900 advertising was used by big business to instilled certain values and stimulated mass consumption. They prompted a way of thinking about technology. They helped people believe that technology shapes society, not the other way around. Technology was seen as the "big fix". It was seen as the "cause" of human well-being.

Being modern through advertising meant ease of operation through technology. "Technology and science not only became the great panacea for everyday problems; they also stood for values at the core of American life'.

But through history there were criticisms. Jefferson warned against the factory system. Some felt Americans were sacrificing moral progress for material power. Thoreau said that men had become tools of their tools. People sought "improved means to an unimproved end". Henry Adams saw the electric dynamo as replacing the power of the cross as the primary force in civilization.

20th century critics like Lewis Mumford were less emotional. He countered that warfare and religious monasticism were forces that sparked and spread technologies. He worried about the threat technology posed to social and spiritual progress. Later he saw us as moving too fast blindly. He saw the "Myth of the Machine". The machine rather than the human condition became the comparison between countries.

Jacques Ellul saw technique as the evil factor. This includes machines, organizational practices, and a manner of thinking that is inherantly mechanistic. Langdon Winner saw it as even more out of control and volatile. He said "we do not use technologies as much as live them". Men make technological changes with little regard to the consequences. People have begun to be passive to everything technical. He doesn't see technology as value-neutral, and advocates weighing the political implications before allowing change.

He sees the problem not as technological determinism but the "painful ironies of technical choice".