Sennet: Passive relation to technology

This is an important issue when we think about cooperation, real-world cooperation about demanding projects. If we just think that the media tools that we're using are just sort of passive instruments, we're really succumbing to a kind of hidden logic in those tools, which says that you're going to get no more skilled at communication than what has been set into the programme. My concern about all of this is that a passive relation to technology ultimately is de-skilling to the user. That's why I've become so interested in the whole question about craftsmanship. And my belief is that there's something we can learn from material craftsmanship that will help us understand better how to engage with and become better craftsmen in using very new kinds of tools, which are largely disembodied. They're screen tools rather than hand tools. Which means that we have to rethink things like user-friendliness, whether this is really an overarching goal. When we want a tool to be user-friendly, i.e., that someone else did the thinking for us, and when we want tools that are more open, more indeterminate, and more difficult to use, but in which we built up a skill in ourselves by addressing that difficulty.