The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History by R. Douglas Francis (review)

What ‘imperatives’ have shaped Canadian thought over the last century and a half? Douglas Francis argues that there have been two competing tendencies, the moral imperative and the technological. The latter elbowed aside the former and, despite the best hopes and intentions of Canadian intellectuals, reformatted our thought.

Much of what Francis discusses here is familiar from the work of previous chroniclers of technology and communication studies. The contribution he makes is to pull it all together and develop a coherent argument about the development of ideas over time. From T.C. Keefer and his Philosophy of Railroads, written in 1849, to the present, Francis contends that change has been identified as the central characteristic of the technological age and of the thinking about it. This is a useful insight, for change challenges and undermines the certainties of a moral imperative.

Scholars such as Lewis Mumford and Carl Mitcham have identified four categories of technology: technology as object, exemplified in tools, machines, and consumer products; technology as knowledge; technology as process (the process of making and using, rather than the how of making and using); and technology as volition (the aims of those using technology). To these Francis adds his own, the imperative. Here he links his analysis to twentieth-century interpretations of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan on the way technology alters our very minds.

This is good stuff. Less happy is the format of the book. It is in the standard intellectual history style. It opens with a literature review, one that is as dry as most such reviews. The study proceeds to a set of biographical sketches of thinkers from Keefer on, arranged chronologically. This is standard format for intellectual history but it creates problems. There is little room for context beyond the immediate experience of the writers under discussion. Their thoughts are abstracted from the societies in which they lived, except for the impact of ‘big events’ such as wars. The approach also leads to oversimplification, boiling down the mix of ideas and experiences of the subjects to deceptively homogeneous ideologies. Some of the understanding of the role of change is lost when thought is frozen in time and space.

The approach also makes the reader ask for less, or more. There is a good deal of repetition in the ideas of these thinkers, and little would have been lost by trimming away some of the less innovative. On the other hand, given the broad sweep, one is left to wonder at the omission of some. The literature review does not deal with some of the more familiar analysts of technology’s impact such as C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. Canadian thinkers since George Grant and Northrop Frye get short shrift in a final chapter that seems hastily tacked on. Here it would have been useful to digress into popular culture, where the contrasting views on technology of artists such as Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young are instructive.

Douglas Francis has given us, in one book, a valuable overview of Canadian thinking about technology. That overview reminds us how central the relationship of humans and technology has been in Canadian history, how complicated is the task of sorting out the positives and negatives, and that we need to consider, carefully and deeply, what that imperative has done and is doing to our understanding of the world and ourselves.