Technology as Metaphor: Tropes of Construction, Destruction and Instruction in Globalization

Abstract

This chapter probes two common, but also unstable, terms used in contemporary analyses of political change: technology and globalization. It defamilarizes dogmatic ways of seeing reality by exploring technology as metaphor. How does technology leave individuals regarding new relations of power, knowledge and control as if they are only shifts in things, products, or images as globalization subjects peoples and places to radical change? This analysis, firstly, examines how technology can be reconsidered metaphorically in globalization studies as a trope of construction, destruction and/or instruction all at the same time. By showing material bases for seeing technology as a ‘boundary object’ (Bowker and Starr, 1999) in existing relations of globalizing change, the study considers, secondly, how material realities can be grasped in social change metaphors, such as , for example, the rhetoric of electrification as terms for appraising globalization positively and negatively in political discourse.