Assemblages of Technologies

And furthermore...

While we are on the topic of typologies of technologies, David Rooney has a contribution to make in A Contextualising, socio-technical definition of technology: learning from Ancient Greece and Foucault. Similarly to John Stewart et al, Rooney assumes that technologies form assemblages or systems. He uses four categories defined initially by Michel Foucault. They are not so much technologies as socio-technical elements of an assemblage, present within any given situation. Following Foucault, Rooney calls them:

• production technologies;
• semiotic (or sign system) technologies;
• technologies of power; and
• technologies of the self.

For Rooney, Foucault's approach permits a contextualising discussion of technology. In effect, any technical device when used in practice becomes a technology in one or all of these four dimensions. A technical device or artefact, then, is not defined as a technology intrinsically, by inherent qualities. Through use, a technical device or artefact becomes a technology of a particular kind, for example of production, signification, empowerment or self-realisation. We could, in this way, link up Rooney's approach with that outlined by Stewart et al. to say that technical artefacts, as enactive interfaces, allow people to enact the practices which make up the worlds of production, of signification, of empowerment and of self-realisation.