Global media corporations are remapping the planet.

Previous geographical alignments

organized by political power are being recorded in terms of electronic mega system. A new information
order is taking shape, but within a complicated world of sociopolitical institutions. Computer
technologies are promoted for democratization even as cyber warfare becomes anew strategy for the
military. Educational is cut back, while consumerism prospers. Journalism, advertising, public relation,
and entertainment have depended on sophisticated technology since the days of radio and television;
digitalization has put media industries on a new order of magnitude. The upheavals are immense. And
they are not taking place in abstraction, outside everyday affairs.
Political economy and cultural studies give us important perspectives, but the philosophy of
technology also has a strategies role to play in our coming to grips with the perplexing issues of
globalization. Accounting for the social influence of media technologies is a historical and empirical task,
but so is, clearly, the philosophy of technology as well. Since technologies are not neutral but value-
laden, intellectual work on the character of technology as a whole necessary for the long term.

Philosophies of technology
In western intellectual history, from classical Greece until today, there are three philosophical
approaches to technology : Aristotles teleology, Marxs materialism, and Heideggers existentialism.
Each is theoretically district. These three philosophies of technology cannot be listed side by side. Marx
and Heidegger are in contention with Aristotles legacy, and Marxs critical approach opposes
Heideggers paradigm, though in lesser terms.
Technology in the Aristotelian tradition corresponds to, or renders, the Greek techm-a
noun usually translated, especially in Aristotles own works, as art are understood as artifact, tools, or
products. The Marxist and Heideggerian philosophies of technology, on the other hand, define
technology predicatively, as an action, as something you do-understood as cultural activity or process.
As Arnold pacey puts it, technology-practice is the application of scientific and other knowledge to
practical task by ordered systems that involve people and organization, living this and machines
(Pacey,1996,p.6)
Despite the grater intellectual substance of Marx and Heidegger, the Aristotelian model has
dominated research and scholarship in communication historically. The philosophies of technology
rooted in Marx and in Heidegger are the most productive ones.

Application to media and mass communication theory

The Philosophy of technology has two primary applications to media and mass communication
theory : triadic theories and cultural continuity.

Triadic mass communication theory

For Marx and Heidegger to be taken seriously when articulating the relation between media and
culture, a triadic theory of communication is necessary. Marxs and Heideggers radical contextualsm
requires cultural approaches in which we first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up
residence in the world we have produced (Carey, 1989, p. 30.) In a dyadic cultural theory of
communication, the symbolic world within humans are constituted accounts for the process of meaning
making, but without incorporating the physical world explicitly. Rooting our understanding of media
technology in culture is a significant advance, but the rooting itself begs the question whether our
cultural approaches account for technology adequately.
Triadic theories are those endorsed by the Marxist and heideggerian paradigms. George Herbet
Mead, for example, in Majid tehranians reconstruction of mead, the world and social reality are
symbolically connected through and established or emerging stock of signal (technology) and
knowledge (Culture) (Tehranian, 1991, p. 57)
James Carey is a theorist in the Canadian tradition who took technology seriously. His essay
compares Mc Luhan and Innis has become the standard critique of Canadas triadic tradition (Carey
1967; 1989, pp 142-172). Carey wrote famously of the transmission and ritual theories of
communication, rejecting the simplifications of the transmission view rooted in a monologist
instrumentalism and advocating a ritual perspective with the triadic orientation of the critical and
existentialist philosophies of technology
Heideggers philosophies of technology is deep and wide enough to contradict dyadic
communication theories. Heidegger challenges cultural theories of the media and mass communication
to take technology seriously. But he makes no proposal for getting technology under control so as to
make it serve human needs.
In Heideggers view, because our beingness is situated today in technological conditions
radically opposed to human freedom, there are no oases in which the moral imagination can prosper
undisturbed. Given Heideggers longstanding interest in the philosophy of language, he believes that,
through a revival of human-centered language, we can enrich our technological revealing.

Cultural Continuity
Marx and Heidegger find that definition deficient and view technology instead as human process
value-laden throughout. In their perspective, valuing penetrates all technology activity, from the
analytical frame work used to understand technological issues, through the processes of design and
fabrication, to the resulting tools and products. Although valuing is surely involved on the uses to which
people put these technological objects, valuing saturates every phase prior to usage as well.
Technological tools and products are particular. Any technological object embodies decisions to
develop one kind of knowledge and not any others to use certain resources. There is no purely natural
or technical justification for all these decision. The philosophy of technology in the tradition of
Heidegger is of immediate relevance and directs us to the norm of cultural continuity.
Technological products are legitimate if and only if they maintain cultural continuity, this value-
laden enterprise that we call technology must comport well with cultural continuity. The viability of
historically and geographically constituted people ought to be considered non-negotiable. Historical
continuity is necessary to contradict notion of blind evolutionary progress that undervalue continuity
altogether. Also, continuity undercuts the modernization schemes devised by transnational companies
or colonial power to strengthen their economic status.
Opposites are at work here: differentiation and integration, centralization and decentralization,
the large-scale and the small-scale, uniformity and pluriformity. and difficult choices must often be
made between these opposites. The point is to place a democratic decision about the mix in the hands
of the people themselves, who speak in their own interest for those technological innovations that most
appropriately server their local cultures.
 Convivial tools with a human face are interactive and maintain a kind of open-ended
conversation with their users. They responsibly limited, and therefore provide a competitive media
system that honors the norm of cultural continuity. For example : Tv Globo has a virtual monopoly in
brazil. But locally owned video cameras provide a convivial alternative; backyard groups use them as a
tool for social change. The Metal worker union of Sao Bernando has developed a training project called
Workers TV. In Toronto, video in schools, churches, and community forums are used to help Latin
American immigrants settle into a new way of life in Canada, Programs produced and distributed by
immigrants themselves encourage the cultural authenticity that is marginalized by the corporates and
technological constraints of the traditional media.
As a result of foregrounding technology philosophy, the speed, size, and character of technology
are important issues for analysis and application. Instrumentalism thrives as big system. But, instead of
our being overawed by the global media giants and of our designing normative models only gor the
monopolies and for big-brand media, alternative technologies that are close to the ground are very
important