The starting point for our Creative Citizen research project was a question asking whether and to what extent digital communications technologies afford new civic potential. We also invited ourselves to consider how this potential might be enhanced by digital media, thereby making an assumption that agency and significance might properly be ascribed to technology in its relation to creative citizenship.

As we have seen in the preceding chapters and their detailed accounts of creative citizenship in action, this assumption demands critical reflection. Technology itself is rarely addressed head on within communities of the kind we have worked with. The truly indispensable drivers of creative citizenship are motivated people who have built a shared commitment, usually through face-to-face relationships in specific real world places. Digital technologies are today a commonplace and important tool for such groups, in some cases even an operational necessity. How are we to understand the role of technology in these processes?

The definition, meaning and agency of technology has long been a key question in media and cultural studies, as we try to make sense of the ‘changes in scale and pace of human affairs’ (McLuhan, 1964) that are a characteristic of living in a permanent upgrade culture, where the impacts of technological innovation often seem to be accelerating. Raymond Williams (1974), in his analysis of television as a ‘cultural form’, argued that the technologies of photography, telegraphy, and radio were components in the invention of broadcast television, but that what drove technological invention were accelerated social processes, notably mobility and growth ‘in a society characterised at its most general levels by a mobility and extension of the scale of organisations: forms of growth which brought with them immediate and longer-term problems of operative communications’ (Williams, 1974: 18–19). In this reading, technologies of communication develop in relation to the communicative and organisational conditions of society. So for Williams the accelerated development of industrial-scale printing technologies in the 19th century was associated with the communicative needs of a newly urbanised population seeking democratic representation, rather than an inevitable result of coal, iron and steam driven technologies (1974: 21).