comps reading - Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking

Written by Seymour Papert, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• The purpose of computer criticism is not to condemn but to understand, to explicate, to place in perspective.

• Technocentrism refers to the tendency to give a similar centrality to a technical object, for example, LOGO. When questions like "what is the effect of LOGO on cognitive development" are asked, such turns of phrases often betray a tendency to think of "LOGO" as "agents" that acts directly on thinking and learning.

• The context for human development is always a culture, never an isolated technology.

• People from humanities are often the most vulnerable to the technocentric trap. Insecurity sometimes makes a technical object loom too large in their thinking.

• Everyone realizes that it is carpenters who use wood, hammers and saws to produce houses and furnitures, and the quality of the product depends on the quality of their (i.e., carpenters) work. But when it comes to computers and LOGO, critics seem to move into abstractions and ask questions like "is LOGO goof for cognitive thinking of children."

• Technocentrism is often supported by a certain model of what a "rigorous" experiment in educational psychology consists of. I (Papert) will call this "the treatment model." The use of this model requires care, and technocentrism places unskilled users at risk, and the risk is greatest in the interpretation of negative results.

• Technocentric thinking favors the "treatment" methodology, which leads to a danger that all experiments with computers and learning will be seen as failures: either they are trivial because very little happened, or they are "unscientific" because something real did happen and too many factors changed at once.

• At the core of the process of design is the art of trade-off.

• Each choice is a reflection of cultural affiliation. The individual's taste is never purely individual but a reflection of culture.

• LOGO practitioners must learn to integrate the larger social movement into their thinking. To do so, two steps need to be followed:

1. pay attention to the individual manifestations of cultural movement around computers
2. use the interest they might arouse