Digital technology as a tool or a medium? Are we talking about just instruments or a specific form of societal activity? Is digital technology neutral

Digital technologies have become so present in our societies that they are now a need. They are already representing an enormous part of our society’s communication and it is very likely that they will become even more spread and essential. Not only the Internet, but most of the devices we interact with everyday use digital technologies: they transform the analog world into a processable set of digital information and they return it to our analog minds.

The question about the nature of digital technologies is not banal, indeed we ought to consider the role that they have in our lives, in our political systems, in our arts and in our whole environment because computers have become so ubiquitous in our societies that it’s undeniable that they are effecting our world in many ways.

George Rückriem writes in his paper “Tool or Medium” an historical research with the purpose of clarifying whether digital technologies should be seen as a tool or as a medium. He navigates through Leont’ev perspective and thoughts that generated the activity theory and tries to explain why this can be useful to solve the problem. The result of this investigation (in short) is an ambivalent (inevitable) answer “Tools and media are not different things but different functions, different modes of reflecting on them”.

Rückriem blends psychological theories with social studies, media theories and activity theory, but what is missing in his paper (besides a clear use of English language) is a distinction between the different uses that can be performed of digital technologies. For instance if we look at computer technologies, we can can look at software such as Photoshop as a digital tool and VoIp software as a digital medium (to take clear examples)
It would be very reductive (and i believe somehow superficial) to consider digital technology as a whole, without looking at the different usages that can be done of it or even just giving a glance to the different roles of hardware and software. It is indeed a difficult task to do so, just like if we would like to find a singular adjective to describe the whole earth. (?)

Digital technologies such as Internet are media almost as per definition. They not only are channels to deliver information but also channels to receive information. But not only!
Internet can be a medium to deliver services, thus becoming a tool.

Said this, I believe that no technology can be fully neutral as they always carry limitations that in a way or another lead to different outcomes. Just think of the different results achieved in digital arts through the year of increasing of computing power!
In this way, digital instruments somehow carry a part of themselves (their result of their limitations) into the final result of their usage and in this way can deliver a message, becoming in this way both Media and Tools.
To use another example, i believe we can look at graphic interfaces as tools to interact with machines, but also as a set of statements about usability, accessibility, and even about branding trends (I’m here referring especially to operating systems). In this way, the lesson of Mc Luhan becomes can be somehow twisted as “the tool can be a medium for a message”.