Iowa communication professor John Durham Peters analyzed the history behind the perception of technological determinism as akin to a virus or curse word during a presentation at a Sept. 19 Annenberg Research Seminar. His presentation, "Two Cheers for Technological Determinism," focused on the need for a critical reappraisal of technological determinism. Today, being labeled a technological determinist evokes the same response as saying that a person “enjoys strangling cute puppies,” said Peters, the University of Iowa's A. Craig Baird Professor in Communication Studies. The term connotes such a "depraved wickedness" that it renders further discussion unnecessary. Peters' discussion traced the historical origins to the 1920s and 30s, where Thorstein Veblen coined technological determinism as the practice of craft, skill and science. But how did it come to adopt all of the negative connotations of an "-ism?" The real "puppy strangler" came into focus in the 1960s, explained Peters, and technological determinism began to be associated with ideas such as historical inevitability, fatalism, lack of popular control over decision-making, autonomous technology, denial of cultural contingency and a fear of too much power in the hands of engineers. Peters quoted 1964's Technological Society as stating: “Each of us in our own life must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants. The ability to analyze the determinisms that press upon us is the very path to freedom." "If you're going to give up on determinism, if you're going to give up on some sort of analytical connection between variable 'A' and variable 'B,' you might as well give up on knowledge," he said. He traced the fear of technological determinism to "an ethically and metaphysically suspicious subject-object distinction," which is disastrous for studies of technology and the media. Peters concluded by saying that the misconception of technological determinism as an encroachment of technology on human beings "denies the fact that we as humans are technical all the way down." The next Annenberg Research Seminar is Sept. 26 and will feature a discussion by USC Viterbi's Kristina Lerman titled “Dynamics of Information Spread on Networks."