The resource that has piqued my interest in the last couple of days is written by Alan Bainbridge Digital technology, human world making and the avoidance of learning 
. But I immediately realised that Alan’s ideas on the use of technology as a psychological defence in learning situations might not go down too well in a group of (mainly) educators exploring the use of a new technology.
If you have read this far, you are probably wondering why I have ploughed on regardless. Well it’s because I have a touching faith in the power of attraction embodied in the word ‘fetish’. I am hoping that your attention might be sustained by your wish to find out more about the fetish of technology.
I discovered the attraction of the word ‘fetish’ when setting research papers for final year undergraduate seminars in the late 1990s. This paper, The Fetish of Technique by David Wastell was always the first one to be chosen by students. abstract
I can give you a flavour of the paper by rewriting a sentence from the abstract for an ed tech context, deleting and replacing two terms.
quote
The grandiose illusion of an all-powerful {method deleted} technology product or service allows practitioners to deny their feelings of impotence in the face of the daunting technical and political challenges of {systems development deleted} technology-enhanced learning.
.
I did a search for fetish of technology to see who else had written about it.
Donna Haraway wrote about it when considering the idealised social locations in advanced capitalist societies, specifically “ Church: Electronic fundamentalist 'super-saver' preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women's meanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle.”
See A CYBORG MANIFESTO
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIALIST-FEMINISM IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY pdf
YOUTUBE sORbItAvhco Alf Hornborg explains technology as the central fetish of capitalism, ideas that he has written about in an extended and mote traditionally scholarly way.
See Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism by Alf Hornborg. abstract
In this video
Both Haraway and Horborg are interested in material semiotics – that maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts) and that networks of these relations can be both of these. See Actor-Network Theory (ANT) wikipedia
In contrast, Bainbridge is coming from the perspective of human flourishing and psychology/ psycotherapy. What links Horborg and Bainbridge in my mind is the suggestion that over-privileging technology in our considerations risks the neglect of ethical concerns.
Editor's Note: I have created a video plugin using drag-and-drop from YouTube. I've also broken some paragraphs at the embedded references.