In a recently uploaded profile of the impressive New York graphic design practice 2x4 on the apple.com website (http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/2x4/), Michael Rock, partner of the practice and one of the most articulate intelligent graphic designers working today, describes how technology has played an integral part of not only the management but also the creative process of the studio “I feel there’s this important parallel with the development of technology and our own careers as designers”.

Our relationship with technology has always been a dialectical affair; we build machines and they, in turn, build us, by shaping the world around us, and how we see it. Our machines have impacted on our sense of time and space, and how we communicate. Steven Johnson in his book Interface Culture (1997) describes the effect the computer has had on his writing “The computer had not only made it easier for me to write; it had also changed the very substance of what I was writing, and in that sense I suspect, it had an enormous effect on my thinking as well”. 

Cultural critics have found different ways to describe this profound effect of technology. Eric Havelock (A Preface to Plato (1963)) and Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy(1982)) have both used the notion of ‘transformation theory’ to show how new communication tools, far from simply allowing us to do things more effectively, radically transform human perception and culture. In a culture that is constructed, maintained and mediated largely through forms of communication, writing and imaging technologies may have the most transformative powers of all.

If we accept this analogous relationship then it seems important that we find ways to acknowledge the consequences of its extensive powers. As the streaming quicktime movie of the hectic 2x4 studio cuts between shots of people working on their silver powerbooks with shots of the hustle and bustle of a typical day on the streets of New York City we should not forgot that the technology that transforms the world into a so-called global village of fibre optics and efficiently flowing capital and information, is also used to destroy entire cities – as we have so clearly seen in Iraq and Lebanon.

Certainly new technology promotes itself on it’s socially empowering capabilities – rather than use as military power, or as a means of social control. In claims such as “It’s everything you can think of” or “The world at your finger tips” by the likes of AOL and Microsoft, technology, demands us to communicate quicker, easier and more frequently with anyone – anywhere and at anytime. Such 'sales pitches' hint at the intrinsic contradiction of empowering through communicational tools that at the same time clearly control the way we communicate.

One only has to look at Microsoft’s ubiquitous business tool PowerPoint, and with an estimated 30 million presentations delivered everyday in offices, conferences, coffee shops,  and classrooms all over the world it seems increasingly difficult to avoid it. But as was pointed out in a New York Times article on the application, PowerPoint is more than just a tool:  “it is a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion”. Simply by allowing a case to be made in the form of a bullet point, it forces its own prescriptive will as to how information can be organized. In short, it organizes the manner in which we should think in such a way that, as Sherry Turkle has noted “encourages us to see things in black and white”.

Colin Powell’s now infamous ”Iraq's Failure to Disarm” PowerPoint presentation to the UN back in 2003 with it’s CNN style graphics and multimedia content illustrates clearly the immense strength of such technology in forming a convincing ‘black-white, ‘good-bad’ vision.  It has been reported that the presentation was a source of great distress to the former secretary of state. Powell had spent four days at the CIA shifting and moulding the intelligence; as well as agonising over the typeface and transition choice.

Whether as an attachment or an extension of the mind, technology helps regulate and structure both culture and its individual mediators and subjects alike.