Nancy Baym’s discussion of technological determinism in Personal Connections in the Digital Age theorized so much of what I observe in everyday life. I am relieved that Baym can synthesize such abstract, uncharted behaviors in everyday life in a scholarly way. This gives these things real weight in the world – they aren’t something that just happens as the times change; they have real impact on every level. Anyway, the connection between technological determinism and domestication is of particular interest to me. From my perspective as a twenty one year old of the millennial generation, I believe that we are at the very top of the tipping point between non-domestication and domestication.

For example, it is not uncommon for my generation’s parents to be online – whether it’s email or full-blown Facebook addiction. I think the millennial generation parents got online around the same time as their kids, but the age at which this happened is important. For the older generation, there is a distinct moment in time when they remember getting online. For the younger generation, the memories are murkier. This is where technological determinism becomes so insanely poignant to today. We are at a point in which there are humans who do not know a world without the Internet (as an example of a new technology). These humans, however, live with other humans who do very much know the world without the Internet. It seems that there is a divide in this generation of humans that either completely detest the Internet or have embraced it wholeheartedly. Here I think it is particularly interesting to examine the fulcrum of technological determinism and the social construction of technology. As society has broken off into facets of technological use, we can observe humans’ relationship to technology.

A particular example of this tension comes up with Baym’s example of what Claude Fischer calls “impact-imprint”, an argument “in which technologies change history by transferring their ‘essential qualities to their users, imprinting themselves on users’ individual and collective psyches’” (Baym 14). I once heard that Steve Jobs took a prototype of the iPad to some rural village and asked a small child to use it; the objective was to develop the iPad to a point where it was completely intuitive to even a child who had no experience of prior technology. About a year ago, I was taking a trip with my mom and brother. We arrived at LAX to check into our flight. We approached a digital kiosk where my mom entered our names and flight number. Here, I witnessed my mom attempting to zoom into the kiosk screen with her index finger and thumb in an expanding motion as though she was on an iPad in order better see what she was doing.

This was extremely humorous to my brother and me. This is also a poignant example of the dichotomy between the theoretical framework of technological determinism and the social construction of technology. Supposedly, the iPad was created with the thought of human intuition and mind – the technology is ingrained with how a human might naturally navigate through space. However, my mom’s reflex to zoom into a screen that was certainly not designed by Apple proves Fischer’s “impact-imprint” – she was so innately used to the zoom mechanism that it became her intuitive response.