technoculture

Technoculture is a field of study and a cultural condition that treats technology and culture as deeply interwoven. It examines how technological artifacts, systems, and infrastructures organize social life, while cultural norms, values, and power relations shape the development, adoption, and governance of technology. In technoculture, technology is an active participant in communication, work, learning, identity, and social organization.

Scope includes digital media, information networks, consumer electronics, biotechnology, and transportation systems. Everyday practices—such as smartphone use, social media, and online collaboration—interact with institutions like education, labor markets, and government. The concept also covers the material and ecological effects of technology, including data infrastructures, platform ecosystems, and environmental impact.

Foundations include science and technology studies, media and cultural studies, and sociology. Key ideas are the social shaping of technology and actor-network theory, and McLuhan’s insight that the medium influences how content is understood. The field emphasizes mutual influence: design and policy shape use, while values and power affect which technologies are developed and deployed.

Current debates address determinism versus contingency, digital surveillance and privacy, algorithmic governance, platform capitalism, digital divides, and environmental sustainability. Critics examine whether technoculture reproduces inequalities or empowers marginalized communities through open knowledge, participatory culture, and democratic technics.

Scholars use technoculture to analyze how technology and culture reshape each other, and to trace how cultural practices steer technological evolution. It remains a lens for understanding the interlinked relations among people, artifacts, and systems in the contemporary world.