Ageing and the Technological Imaginary: Living and Dying in the Age of Perpetual Innovation

Technology tends toward perpetual innovation. Technology, enabled by both political and economic structures, propels society forward in a kind of technological evolution. The moment a novel piece of technology is in place, immediately innovations are attempted in a process of unending betterment. Bernard Stiegler suggests that, contra Heidegger, it is not being-toward-death that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. Rather, it is technological innovation that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. In fact, for Stiegler, human evolution has always been part of technological evolution. While one can quibble with the notion of human-technology co-evolution, there is something to be said for the way in which human perception of time, of ageing, and of death seems to be judged against the horizon of perpetual evolution of technological innovation. In this technological imaginary, of which modern medicine is constituent, ageing and death seemingly may be infinitely deferred, and it is this innovating deferral that shapes the contemporary social imaginary around ageing and death in modern medicine. Yet, the reality of living (which is to say ageing) and dying always manifests itself differently than the scripts given to us by the technological imaginary with its myth of endless innovation. In fact, I shall argue that, where the Church created an ars moriendi, the technological imaginary gives us an ars ad mortem when it becomes clear that ageing and death cannot be infinitely deferred. And further, I shall argue that the Church must revivify its ars vivendi—that is to say, its liturgies, its arts, its technics—as a counter narrative to the myth of perpetual innovation that shapes the technological imaginary.

Tom Swift’s Three Inventions of Television

This article draws on fictional depiction of television in three novels in the Tom Swift series of boys' books, published in 1914, 1928, and 1933, in attempt to come to terms with different aspects of what sociologist of technology call the “technological imaginary” of television. As the novels’ depictions of the various television inventions demonstrate, the period of the first decades of the twentieth century was typified by a great deal of permutations in the very conception of what is television and what would it be good for. In particular, the article highlights the fast-changing intermedial context that surrounded the project of realizing television technology during this era.

‘You’ve Got Mail’

Although the Victorian period gave birth to a strong tradition of critique of technology and industrialization, it also fostered a counter-tradition: a new and generative technological imaginary. In recent years, scholars of Victorian culture have begun to map out this technological imaginary in readings of canonical Victorian novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. This chapter surveys this recent critical work, then turns to Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864) as an example of how technologies of communication and transportation become vehicles for rich intersubjective exchanges, generating narrative structures that link characters and novels to one another in complex webs mimicking Victorian Britain’s network of rails, wires, and postal routes.