Fatalism and technology: is the technological development autonomous? Eduard Aibar Puentes eaibar@campus.uoc.es Director of the UOC Doctoral Program in the Information Society Professor of Humane and Philologie Studies at the UOC Abstract: Many present analysis of technological development reinforce the idea that technology evolves in an autonomous way from other social phenomena. This view has become part of the standard image of technology and goes together with the thesis of technological determinism that so often pervades studies on the social impacts of ICT. This paper shows the serious difficulties that arise from those ideas on the basis of recent studies on the dynamics of technological change. [close]