In School and Society, one of his first significant educational works, John Dewey (1915)emphasized the need for people to understand the basic mechanisms that underpin society. He argued that the rural dwellers of 19th century America, when compared to the inhabitants of Dewey’s industrial Chicago, had possessed a better understanding of the technological processes that surrounded them. The inhabitants of rural America, Dewey claimed, understood how things were made, who in their communities was involved in the process, and the implications that this production process had for the lives of workers and consumers. This idea of developing an understanding of how things work is what is referred to as“technological transparency.” Dewey thought that knowledge and in-depth understanding of the technologies that underpinned their society would afford citizens the opportunity to intervene in technological processes when necessary and would help them to be aware of how systems, structures or mechanisms around them function (Waddington, 2010). Dewey hoped that the industrial technologies of his day would become open to the understanding of citizens, rather than being closed off from their understanding. In this way, citizens would be able to make technologies work for them, rather than simply being shaped by prevailing technologies (Shaikh, Zuberi, Waddington, Thomas & Venkatesh, 2011).
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