“I will probably never use this information again.” I thought as I walked toward the cathedral on my first day of class. I am a senior engineering student taking a summer English literature course. How is this going to be important for what I will do the rest of my life? Although I still asked the same question a few more times during this semester in frustration, I found that this class on Narrative and Technology would create a strong impact on my viewpoint towards engineering and technology.
I had an engineering class similar to this called sustainability, which I mentioned before on my previous posts. This class aimed at the same technological and environmental issues we dealt with in this course, but it had a different approach. It was solely taught with an environmentalism viewpoint. The course described all of the horrible things society has done to the environment, and the goal was to find the ways to analyze the damage. There was no talk about how to fix the problems or how to begin all of the changes needed to make a difference. When asked by the students on how we are going to solve this whole problem, the professors would just say that it was classified as a “wicked problem”, which meant that it was extremely complex and no one could solve it yet. We constantly watched documentaries and wrote reports basically saying how technology is ruining the world. Most of the time my classmates and I walked out of the class saying, “Well, that was depressing” and had no positive path to solve this problem. I felt like I got nothing out of it.
So when I realized we were going to talk about these issues again in this class, I began to groan. It was such a relief though to realize that a different approach was going to be used instead. The book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley gave a solid introduction to the issue at hand, and began to illustrate the theme of taking care of your technology or “Loving Your Monsters”. Bruno Latour helped me see the interactions between humans and technology through translation and the actor network approach. Slack and Wise further described these theories with agency and assemblages. Keywords and discussions in class kept me constantly thinking about what I have read, and most of the time I left with a headache.
All of these ideas came together with the final piece from “Love Your Monsters”. The authors of Love Your Monsters had a Postenvironmental view on technology issues. Finally there were people that I completely agreed with! It was no longer a piece lecturing you to become a vegetarian and telling you how bad technology is. Their ideas revolved on taking care and fine tuning current technology and technology of the future. They encouraged technological growth, along with “continuing to care for unwanted consequences.” It was multidimensional thinking from all of these authors mentioned above that made me understand these issues.
So even though I may not be the best at making movies or writing in an English literature style, I got a lot out of this class. The master/slave dialect keeps me from being a zombie on my phone, Latour’s actor network theory gave me a valuable tool for solving very complex problems, and the postenvironmentalism take on technology gives me hope for earth’s future as well as mine.