Colin McSwiggen examines where we place blame in a technological society:
Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Is it television or bad parenting that’s destroying the American family? Were the Fukushima meltdowns a man-made disaster or are nuclear reactors inherently unsafe? These questions all spawn from the same worn-out false dichotomy about the political nature of technology: is the problem us or it? …
As a cognitive scientist, [Don] Norman [seen in the video above] researched technical screw-ups. He observed people “making errors – sometimes serious ones – with mechanical devices… computer operating systems… even airplanes and nuclear power plants.” What he found is that guilt interferes with improvement, that people will invariably “either try to hide the error or blame themselves for ‘stupidity’ or ‘clumsiness,’” and as a result no one calls for better designs that could have prevented the problems in the first place. Norman’s great contribution to design discourse has been to shift the blame to the things, and demand that they be fixed.
The Dish 