Abstract

A notorious controversy among historians refers to the issue of ‘technological determinism’ and the categories related to theoretical aspects of modernization. The ambivalence between instrumental, contextual and social approaches is obvious in these disputes. A justified answer to these problems may be that the mediators of technology are not simply channeling technology, but neither are the users passive consumers. Societies resist and eventually incorporate the new into the old, and their citizens selectively modify and use technologies to create new cultures and new forms of modernisation. There is an interactive social construction which modifies technologies and new forms of artificial life.