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The Technological Society
by Jacques EllulAs insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book. "A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.&”—Harper's &“One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs.&”—The Nation &“A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.&”—Los Angeles Free Press
The Technological State in Indonesia: The Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series)
by Sulfikar AmirUsing a historical sociology approach, this book illustrates the formation of the technological state in Indonesia during the New Order period (1966-1998). It explores the nexus between power, high technology, development, and authoritarianism situated in the Southeast Asian context. The book discusses how the New Order regime shifted from the developmental state to the technological state, which was characterized by desire for technological supremacy. The process resulted in the establishment of a host of technological institutions and the undertaking of large-scale high-tech programs. Shedding light on the political dimension of socio-technological transformation, this book looks at the relationship between authoritarian politics and high technology development, and examines how effectively technology serves to sustain legitimacy of an authoritarian power. It explores into multiple features of the Indonesian technological state, covering the ideology of development, the politics of technocracy, the institutional structure, and the material and symbolic embodiments of high technology, and goes on to discuss the impact of globalization on the technological state. The book is an important contribution to studies on Southeast Asian Politics, Development, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS).
Technologie, sozialer Wandel und menschliches Verhalten: Einfluss für Wirkung
by Cornelia C. WaltherDieses Buch befasst sich mit dem organischen Kontinuum, das Individuen, Gemeinschaften und die Gesellschaft miteinander verbindet. Ein Überblick über Aspirationelle Algorithmen (AA) und Wertvolle Werkzeuge (WW) illustriert den möglichen Nutzen von Technologie, um einen bewussten Übergang einzuleiten, vom KI-Kult zur Kultivierung von Höherer Humanität (HH). Die menschliche Einstellung, die hinter dem Design und der Nutzung von Technologie steht, bestimmt die Ergebnisse der Technologie. Wenn das angestrebte Ergebnis das Gemeinwohl ist, dann muss das vorausgehende menschliche Streben auf dieses Ziel ausgerichtet sein. Nur eine Technologie, die mit dem Ziel konzipiert wurde, eine Gesellschaft zu schaffen die den Einzelnen zur Entfaltung seines Potenzials befähigt, wirkt sich positiv auf das Gemeinwohl aus. Angesichts des ständigen Wechselspiels zwischen den vier Dimensionen der menschlichen Existenz - Seele, Herz, Verstand, Körper -, die sich in Form von Bestrebungen, Emotionen, Gedanken und Empfindungen ausdrücken, wird deutlich, wie Technologie dazu dienen kann, den Einzelnen systematisch von der Inspiration zum Wunsch, von der Information zur Zündung einer spürbaren Veränderung zu führen. Dieses Buch erklärt den Übergang entlang einer multidimensionalen Einfluss Skala. Zwei sich gegenseitig beeinflussende Dynamiken werden analysiert: erstens der Einfluss von Werten und Bestrebungen auf die Wirkung von Technologie und zweitens der Einfluss von Technologie auf die Einstellung und das Handeln der Nutzer. Beide Ansätze zielen darauf ab, zu bewerten wie Hard- und Software einem Maximum an Menschen zu einem sinnvollen, glücklichen Leben verhelfen können.
Technologies for Development
by Silvia Hostettler Eileen Hazboun Jean-Claude BolayThe book presents case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America addressing global development issues in the fields of health, energy, ICT and urbanism in an interdisciplinary way. The book illustrates key issues at the interface of technology, human, social, and economic development. Bringing together the best papers of the 2014 EPFL-UNESCO Conference on Technologies for Development, this book explores innovative technologies in the global South. It will be a valuable reference for researchers from engineering, natural sciences, information management, quantitative social sciences, and business faculties, as well as for development practitioners and policy makers. It shows the development potential of technologies, and discusses successful processes to develop and deploy them, as well how to evaluate their impact. The introduction to the book begins with a reflection on key issues regarding technologies for development. The following four sections focus on; (i) Innovative Technologies for Development, (ii) Open Source-Open Access-Open Innovation, (iii) Medical Technologies for the Global South, and (iv) Impact Assessment of Technologies for Development. Individual chapters explore issues such as a need for solid standards for newly developed technologies, how to successfully up-scale technology to a larger region, and how to involve private industry in the development of a technology.
Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays
by Alaina LemonSince the Cold War, Americans and Russians have together cultivated fascination with the workings and failures of communicative channels. Each accuses the other of media jamming and propaganda, and each proclaims its own communication practices better for expression and creativity. Technologies for Intuition theorizes phaticity—the processes by which people make, check, discern, or describe channels and contacts, judging them weak or strong, blocked or open. This historical ethnography of intuition juxtaposes telepathy experiments and theatrical empathy drills, passing through settings where media and performance professionals encounter neophytes, where locals open channels with foreigners, and where skeptics of contact debate naifs. Tacking across geopolitical borders, the book demonstrates how contact and channel shift in significance over time, through events and political relations, in social conflict, and in conversation. The author suggests that Cold War preoccupations and strategies have marked theoretical models of communication and mediation, even while infusing everyday, practical technologies for intuition.
Technologies for Sustainable Urban Design and Bioregionalist Regeneration (Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City)
by Dora FranceseThis book explores the role of technology in ecological urban design and regeneration. Part I provides theoretical and methodological insights into technological approaches that offer optimum respect to existing cultural and natural environments, while offering minimum impact and carbon footprint. Parts II and III provide contextualised examples that demonstrate the use, or proposal of, sustainable technologies and solutions for regenerating parts of the urban and peri-urban. The case studies offer insights from the Mediterranean and the Middle East in a diverse range of spaces, from central urban squares, oblique cities, urban waterfronts, decaying suburbs, to peri-urban areas such as touristic waterfronts, former industrial areas, hyper-commercial areas, humid zones and parks.
Technologies of Consumer Labor: A History of Self-Service (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
by Michael PalmThis book documents and examines the history of technology used by consumers to serve oneself. The telephone’s development as a self-service technology functions as the narrative spine, beginning with the advent of rotary dialing eliminating most operator services and transforming every local connection into an instance of self-service. Today, nearly a century later, consumers manipulate 0-9 keypads on a plethora of digital machines. Throughout the book Palm employs a combination of historical, political-economic and cultural analysis to describe how the telephone keypad was absorbed into business models across media, retail and financial industries, as the interface on everyday machines including the ATM, cell phone and debit card reader. He argues that the naturalization of self-service telephony shaped consumers’ attitudes and expectations about digital technology.
Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction (Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture)
by Sherryl Vint Sümeyra BuranTechnologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women’s bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.
Technologies of Gender: Essays On Theory, Film, And Fiction
by Teresa de de Lauretis"Technologies of Gender builds a bridge between the fashionable orthodoxies of academic theory (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, et al.) and the frequently-marginalized contributions of feminist theory.... In sum, de Lauretis has written a book that should be required reading for every feminist in need of theoretical ammunition--and for every theorist in need of feminist enlightenment." --B. Ruby Rich"... sets philosophical ideas humming.... she has much to say." --Cineaste"I can think of no other work that pushes the debate on the female subject forward with such passion and intellectual rigor." --SubStanceThis book addresses the question of gender in poststructuralist theoretical discourse, postmodern fiction, and women's cinema. It examines the construction of gender both as representation and as self-representation in relation to several kinds of texts and argues that feminism is producing a radical rewriting, as well as a rereading, of the dominant forms of Western culture.
Technologies of InSecurity: The Surveillance of Everyday Life
by Katja Aas Helene Gundhus Heidi LomellTechnologies of Insecurity examines how general social and political concerns about terrorism, crime, migration and globalization are translated into concrete practices of securitisation of everyday life. Who are we afraid of in a globalizing world? How are issues of safety and security constructed and addressed by various local actors and embodied in a variety of surveillance systems? Examining how various forms of contemporary insecurity are translated into, and reduced to, issues of surveillance and social control, this book explores a variety of practical and cultural aspects of technological control, as well as the discourses about safety and security surrounding them. (In)security is a politically and socially constructed phenomenon, with a variety of meanings and modalities. And, exploring the inherent duality and dialectics between our striving for security and the simultaneous production of insecurity, Technologies of Insecurity considers how mundane objects and activities are becoming bearers of risks which need to be neutralised. As ordinary arenas - such as the workplace, the city centre, the football stadium, the airport, and the internet - are imbued with various notions of risk and danger and subject to changing public attitudes and sensibilities, the critical deconstruction of the nexus between everyday surveillance and (in)security pursued here provides important new insights about how broader political issues are translated into concrete and local practices of social control and exclusion.
Technologies of International Relations: Continuity And Change
by Carolin Kaltofen Madeline Carr Michele AcutoThis book examines the role of technology in the core voices for International Relations theory and how this has shaped the contemporary thinking of ‘IR’ across some of the discipline’s major texts. Through an interview format between different generations of IR scholars, the conversations of the book analyse the relationship between technology and concepts like power, security and global order. They explore to what extent ideas about the role and implications of technology help to understand the way IR has been framed and world politics are conceived of today. This innovative text will appeal to scholars in Politics and International Relations as well as STS, Human Geography and Anthropology.
Technologies of Knowledge: Rethinking the Archive in Modern South Asia
by Samiparna Samanta Aryendra ChakravarttyThis book traces the role of technology in shaping, curating, disseminating, and archiving knowledge and life in South Asia. It focuses on empirical studies of transformative social processes unleashed by technological intervention in colonial and postcolonial contexts, which have changed our everyday lives and created new sites of domination and resistance, and new archives of history.Unraveling technology as an indicator of South Asia’s encounter with modernity, the chapters in the volume interrogate how technology was witnessed in the production of culture, historicizing and preserving the past, and establishing claims to heritage and history. In addition to examining the critical role of creative and commercial networks in establishing communities, the volume also scans the significant contribution of technology as a mechanism of social control. It highlights the pervasive nature of discourse that continues to assert its legitimacy, despite significant challenges to its structures of dominance, be it in the case of Bengali women or imperial dreams of curating a rapidly eroding past. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the discursive thoughts and practices that permeate the functioning of an empire and a postcolonial nation-state through narratives of resilience, appropriation, silences, and dissent.This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, digital humanities, South Asian studies, modern history, colonialism, and post-independence India.
Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment
by Kelly OliverThe central aim of this book is to approach contemporary problems raised by technologies of life and death as ethical issues that call for a more nuanced approach than mainstream philosophy can provide. To do so, it draws on the recently published seminars of Jacques Derrida to analyze the extremes of birth and dying insofar as they are mediated by technologies of life and death. With an eye to reproductive technologies, it shows how a deconstructive approach can change the very terms of contemporary debates over technologies of life and death, from cloning to surrogate motherhood to capital punishment, particularly insofar as most current discussions assume some notion of a liberal individual. The ethical stakes in these debates are never far from political concerns such as enfranchisement, citizenship, oppression, racism, sexism, and the public policies that normalize them. Technologies of Life and Death thus provides pointers for rethinking dominant philosophical and popular assumptions about nature and nurture,chance and necessity, masculine and feminine, human and animal, and what it means to be a mother or a father. In part, the book seeks to disarticulate a tension between ethics and politics that runs through these issues in order to suggest a more ethical politics by turning the force of sovereign violence back against itself. In the end, it proposes that deconstructive ethics with a psychoanalytic supplement can provide a corrective for moral codes and political clichés that turn us into mere answering machines.
Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception
by Jeanette Edwards Sarah Franklin Eric Hirsch Frances Price Marilyn StrathernTechnologies of Procreation bridges the gap between medical technology and cultural values. It looks at the ways in which the 'technologies of procreation' affect society from an anthropological perspective.
Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the Sacred in a Post-secular Modernity (Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society)
by Sam HanBringing together empirical cultural and media studies of religion and critical social theory, Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the sacred in a post-secular modernity investigates powerful entanglement of religion and new media technologies taking place today, taking stock of the repercussions of digital technology and culture on various aspects of religious life and contemporary culture more broadly. Making the argument that religion and new media technologies come together to create "spheres"—environments produced by an architecture of digital technologies of all sorts, from projection screens to social networking sites, the book suggests that prior social scientific conceptions of religious worship, participation, community and membership are being recast. Using the case of the strain of American Christianity called "multi-site," an emergent and growing church-model that has begun to win favor largely among Protestants in the last decade, the book details and examines the way in which this new mode of religiosity bridges the realms of the technological and the physical. Lastly, the book situates and contextualizes these developments within the larger theoretical concerns regarding the place of religion in contemporary capitalism. Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the sacred in a post-secular modernity offers an important contribution to the study of religion, media, technology and culture in a post-secular world.
Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health (Sexuality, Culture and Health)
by Lenore MandersonTechnologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health highlights the complex ways in which sexuality is expressed and enacted through local ideologies, global identities and material cultures, and their influence on people’s sexual health and well-being. Its impetus is the renewed interest in technology and the ‘social life of things,’ including pharmaceuticals, expanded sexual and related surgery, the growing exploitation of markets for sexual and contraceptive products, and the impact of these on sexual and health practices and outcomes. Organised loosely into three parts, the opening chapters concentrate on female contraception, its availability, and the varied cultural significance attached to the ability to control its use, exploring the politics of reproductive health and birth control, and the ties between technology and power. The middle section turns its attention to men, and the impact of traditional and contemporary concerns about masculinity, and the social and sexual roles of men. The final chapters look at the commonalities across cultural borders and sexual gendered identities – how products and procedures travel, not only through the formal channels of globalisation, but also informally, carried by individuals across cultural and social boundaries through sexual, social and commercial interactions. The volume brings together anthropologists, sociologists and cultural studies scholars, both senior and emerging, from around the globe. Offering an important and topical contribution to the developing global literature on sexuality, sexual identity, culture and health, it is of interest to researchers and advanced students in these areas.
Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society
by Sun-ha HongAn inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, Technologies of Speculation reframes today’s major moral and political controversies around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by data-driven systems. From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.
Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women
by Anne BalsamoThis book takes the process of "reading the body" into the fields at the forefront of culture--the vast spaces mapped by science and technology--to show that the body in high-tech is as gendered as ever. From female body building to virtual reality, from cosmetic surgery to cyberpunk, from reproductive medicine to public health policies to TV science programs, Anne Balsamo articulates the key issues concerning the status of the body for feminist cultural studies in a postmodern world. Technologies of the Gendered Body combines close readings of popular texts--such as Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, the movie Pumping Iron II: The Women, cyberpunk magazines, and mass media--with analyses of medical literature, public policy documents, and specific technological practices. Balsamo describes the ways in which certain biotechnologies are ideologically shaped by gender considerations and other beliefs about race, physical abilities, and economic and legal status. She presents a view of the conceptual system that structures individuals access to and participation in these technologies, as well as an overview of individuals rights and responsibilities in this sometimes baffling area. Examining the ways in which the body is gendered in its interactions with new technologies of corporeality, Technologies of the Gendered Body counters the claim that in our scientific culture the material body has become obsolete. With ample evidence that the techno-body is always gendered and marked by race, this book sets the stage for a renewed feminist engagement with contemporary technological narratives.
Technologies of the Human Corpse (The\mit Press Ser.)
by John TroyerThe relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today.Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.
Technologies of the New Real: Viral Contagion and Death of the Social (Digital Futures)
by Arthur Kroker Marilouise KrokerWith astonishing speed, we have been projected into a new reality where interactions with drones, robotic bodies, and high-level surveillance are increasingly mainstream. In this age of groundbreaking developments in robotic technologies, synthetic biology is merging with artificial intelligence, forming a newly blended reality of machines, bodies, and affect. Technologies of the New Real draws from critical intersections of technology and society – including drones, surveillance, DIY bodies, and innovations in robotic technology – to explore what these advances can tell us about our present reality, or what authors Arthur and Marilouise Kroker deem the "new real" of digital culture in the twenty-first century. Technologies of the New Real explores the many technologies of our present reality as they infiltrate the social, political, and economic static of our everyday lives, seemingly eroding traditionally conceived boundaries between humans and machines, and rendering fully ambivalent borders between the human mind and simulated data.
Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (The\mit Press Ser.)
by Steve F AndersonAn investigation of the computational turn in visual culture, centered on the entangled politics and pleasures of data and images.If the twentieth century was tyrannized by images, then the twenty-first is ruled by data. In Technologies of Vision, Steve Anderson argues that visual culture and the methods developed to study it have much to teach us about today's digital culture; but first we must examine the historically entangled relationship between data and images. Anderson starts from the supposition that there is no great divide separating pre- and post-digital culture. Rather than creating an insular field of new and inaccessible discourse, he argues, it is more productive to imagine that studying “the digital” is coextensive with critical models—especially the politics of seeing and knowing—developed for understanding “the visual.”Anderson's investigation takes on an eclectic array of examples ranging from virtual reality, culture analytics, and software art to technologies for computer vision, face recognition, and photogrammetry. Mixing media archaeology with software studies, Anderson mines the history of technology for insight into both the politics of data and the pleasures of algorithms. He proposes a taxonomy of modes that describe the functional relationship between data and images in the domains of space, surveillance and data visualization. At stake in all three are tensions between the totalizing logic of data and the unruly chaos of images.
Technology and American Society: A History
by Gary Cross Richard SzostakProviding a global perspective on the development of American technology, Technology and American Society offers a historical narrative detailing major technological transformations over the last three centuries. <P><P>With coverage devoted to both dramatic breakthroughs and incremental innovations, authors Gary Cross and Rick Szostak analyze the cause-and-effect relationship of technological change and its role in the constant drive for improvement and modernization. <P><P>This fully-updated 3rd edition extends coverage of industry, home, office, agriculture, transport, constructions, and services into the twenty-first century, concluding with a new chapter on recent electronic and technological advances. <P><P>Technology and American Society remains the ideal introduction to the myriad interactions of technological advancement with social, economic, cultural, and military change throughout the course of American history.
Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production: A Marxian Critique of the "New Economy" (SUNY Series in Radical Social and Political Theory)
by Tony SmithThis book illustrates the continued value of Marxism as a method for analyzing contemporary capitalism, despite the new Post-Fordist variant termed "lean production" that is spreading the globe. Characterized by knowledge work, lean production also includes the mass customization of commodities to consumer desires, and the close cooperation of firms within extended networks of production and distribution. Its proponents argue that it can unite companies, workers, and consumers in the harmonious pursuit of common interests, thereby making the Marxian perspective hopelessly outdated. However, this book is the first to defend Marxian political economy against the claims made by lean production advocates.
Technology and Creativity: Production, Mediation and Evaluation in the Digital Age
by Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen Mukti Khaire Barbara SlavichThis edited book explores the digital challenge for cultural-creative organizations and industries, and its impact on production, meaning-making, consumption and valuation of cultural-creative products and experiences. Discussing digital changes such as user-generated content, social media, business model innovation and product development, the chapters challenge deep-seated definitions of creative individuals, organizations and industries, offering insights into how this creative aspect is argued and legitimized. Placing an emphasis on research that deals with the digital challenge, this collection theorizes its significance for the nature and dynamics of creative industries as well as its impact on the mediation of experiences and the creation and consumption of cultural-creative products.
Technology And Cultural Tectonics
by F. Allan HansonWhat impact has technology had on cultural meanings, values, and symbols? This anthropological exploration shows how technologies produce novel and sometimes jarring realignments among cultural institutions.