Langdon Winner

That's another name I hadn't come across before... his views on the "political nature of artefacts" cropped up in Rheingold's Virtual Community discussion of early MUDs. The inference seemed to be that certain types of software actively encourage the emergence of certain types of community, running contrary to much of the evidence Rheingold provides elsewhere about the way online communities emerge spontaneously & unpredictably. The idea of producing software with a particular kind of interaction designed in is clearly relevant to the issue of VLEs, so I thought I'd look further into this Winner bloke.

I emerged a while later, having been beaten about the head by Engels v Marx, automatic tomato-picking machines & Platonic ships, but largely unconvinced.

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

This is Winner's 1986 paper on the subject. I really don't see that he's saying any more than 'technology reflects the values of the society that produces it, therefore its effects tend to reinforce the status quo, therefore it should be assumed to be a Bad Thing & regarded with deep suspicion'. No new insights there & a far from unassailable conclusion!

Interview with EDU-SHAM CEO

A 1998 satirical piece that shows Winner's deep hostility to the spread of e-learning. Amusing in parts (as much satire is, whether or not you're sympathetic to its aims) it seems to be based on a misapprehension of the subject, overlooking the transforming potential of online learning communities by allowing them no part in the EDU-SHAM dystopia. If e-learning was as Winner describes, or even moving in that direction, it would indeed be undesirable, but this reductio ad absurdum bears so little resemblance to reality that it's difficult to take it seriously.

(Incidentally, the design of his homepage speaks of somebody profoundly uncomfortable in cyberspace , on a mission to make his readers feel the same way.)

I see Rheingold has more to say about LW in chapters I've not yet reached, so I may be revisiting this one.