The media scholar Nancy Baym talks about “social shaping” as a middle way between technology being our master and us being its master. As Roger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon wrote in 1996, there’s a play between how a technology is designed and how its users “domesticate” it. As a result, by the time most people are introduced to something like the Internet, the early adopters have already understood it one way or another. That understanding usually reflects the uses for which the tech was designed, but it may not. So, when someone first showed you the Internet, they told you what it was for, loaded up a page or an app, and implicitly or explicitly told you want they think is important about it. That shaped your understanding of it. This accords with Eleanor Rosch’s “prototype theory” that says that humans don’t understand things in terms of neat, clean definitions, but through examples we take as clear and of the essence.

I think this pretty well captures how technodeterminism works. Some folks invented the Internet for some set of purposes. They gave it a name, pointed to some prototypical examples—sharing scientific papers and engaging in email about them—shaping the way the early adopters domesticated it.

But over time, the Internet escaped from its creators’ intentions. It became a way to communicate person-to-person via email and many-to-many via Usenet. The web came along and the prototypical example became home pages. Social networking came along and the prototype became Facebook. Mobile came along and the prototype became apps—although I’m not convinced that this last step has actually happened.

Keep in mind that a prototype is simply what is taken to be a clear, unambiguous example of something. It leaves plenty of room for less clear examples. At this point it’d be weird if you asked someone, “What’s this Internet that people are so excited about?” and that person pointed to a Nest thermostat. No, the person is far more likely to load Facebook or Snapchat on a mobile phone, and then might point to Nest as an extended example, saying something like, “Even that thermostat is part of the Internet.”

And it’s not just what we point at. The values conveyed by the prototype depend on how we explain it. If Facebook is the prototype, it’ll be one thing if our guide says, “See how you can stay in touch with your friends?” and another if she says, “See this never-ending stream of gossip and chatter from people you barely even remember? GET OUT OF MY HEAD FACEBOOK DEVILS!!!” (Did you spot the difference there?) As always with humans, there’s no separating prototypes from values.

I don’t think technodeterminism is any more mysterious or mystical than that.

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If you had asked me in 1986 what the prototypical use of the Internet was, I would have said UseNet. I used email much more than UseNet, but email seemed too much like real mail, and too much like the text-based terminal-to-terminal systems I’d seen but not used in the 1970s. But UseNet was new: a discussion forum where strangers could talk about whatever they wanted. The different topical forums had even evolved their own forms of rhetoric and governance. Social and emergent. Most excellent!