Article/Book Overview

Book Overview:
Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. 1996.

My pedagogy for teaching with technology at present is informed heavily by Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology. I read this book for the first time this year and am now fascinated with the results of such a methodologically complex treatment of technology and society. As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I am a teacher who values developing generalizable skills, moves, and approaches within my instructional repertoire. I do this so that I may be adaptable in a given situation. And Latour’s book encourages me to continue this practice.

Briefly, Aramis is the name of a mammoth, guided public transportation project developed in France spanning from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. It’s a project that was never enacted, despite the level of technological sophistication and the overwhelming appearance of support from governmental institutions and private corporate entities. And it wasn’t just left inactive, it was mysteriously abandoned even though it was slated to be advertised in the 1988 World’s Fair. Latour’s book, then, is an account of the process by which he and his mentor solved the mystery of who killed Aramis. But it is also a rumination on tools, technology, and use in the philosophical sense.

Latour’s investigation, as well as his findings, have a lot to teach educators about the incorporation of technology in instruction. You see, Latour concludes that what killed Aramis is technologists’ and engineers’ commitment to an imagined future of the project (created by the sponsors and government) as it contradicted the social reality of the project’s development. It began as a research project, but was prematurely made real (fully functional) in the minds of those developing it despite any evidence of overall success. The desire to make profit or to have international prowess overshadowed the material reality of the project. In other words, as in the novel Frankenstein, to dream a technology outside the realm of the social or the real produces extreme tension on the system that must incorporate it. I believe this is true at the level of everyday pedagogy as well as at the level of educational system.