Download or read book The Social Construction of Technological Systems anniversary edition written by Wiebe E. Bijker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.
Download or read book What is Digital Sociology written by Neil Selwyn and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-07-12 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology. Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship. Designed for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, this timely introduction will be an invaluable resource for all sociologists seeking to focus their craft and thinking toward the social complexities of the digital age.
Download or read book Technology and Social Inclusion written by Mark Warschauer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the discussion about new technologies and social equality has focused on the oversimplified notion of a "digital divide." Technology and Social Inclusion moves beyond the limited view of haves and have-nots to analyze the different forms of access to information and communication technologies. Drawing on theory from political science, economics, sociology, psychology, communications, education, and linguistics, the book examines the ways in which differing access to technology contributes to social and economic stratification or inclusion. The book takes a global perspective, presenting case studies from developed and developing countries, including Brazil, China, Egypt, India, and the United States. A central premise is that, in today's society, the ability to access, adapt, and create knowledge using information and communication technologies is critical to social inclusion. This focus on social inclusion shifts the discussion of the "digital divide" from gaps to be overcome by providing equipment to social development challenges to be addressed through the effective integration of technology into communities, institutions, and societies. What is most important is not so much the physical availability of computers and the Internet but rather people's ability to make use of those technologies to engage in meaningful social practices.
Download or read book New Technology in Sociology written by Grant Blank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When technology has been applied in business environments, its justification has usually been cast in terms of saving time or saving money. In the social sciences, the justification must be different; the viability of sociology as a profession, for example, will not be enhanced by cost reductions. The focus in this volume is on a different bottom l
Download or read book Digital Sociology written by Deborah Lupton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-05 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not. The sub-discipline of digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of these technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analysed and understood. This book introduces a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and discusses some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. It covers the new knowledge economy and big data, reconceptualising research in the digital era, the digitisation of higher education, the diversity of digital use, digital politics and citizen digital engagement, the politics of surveillance, privacy issues, the contribution of digital devices to embodiment and concepts of selfhood and many other topics. Digital Sociology is essential reading not only for students and academics in sociology, anthropology, media and communication, digital cultures, digital humanities, internet studies, science and technology studies, cultural geography and social computing, but for other readers interested in the social impact of digital technologies.
Download or read book Technology and Society written by Deborah G. Johnson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-10-17 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of writings by thinkers ranging from Freeman Dyson to Bruno Latour that focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values and how these may affect the future. Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. This anthology focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values. It offers writings by authorities as varied as Freeman Dyson, Laurence Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Judy Wajcman that will introduce readers to recent thinking about technology and provide them with conceptual tools, a theoretical framework, and knowledge to help understand how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology. It offers readers a new perspective on such current issues as globalization, the balance between security and privacy, environmental justice, and poverty in the developing world. The careful ordering of the selections and the editors' introductions give Technology and Society a coherence and flow that is unusual in anthologies. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in STS and other disciplines. The selections begin with predictions of the future that range from forecasts of technological utopia to cautionary tales. These are followed by writings that explore the complexity of sociotechnical systems, presenting a picture of how technology and society work in step, shaping and being shaped by one another. Finally, the book goes back to considerations of the future, discussing twenty-first-century challenges that include nanotechnology, the role of citizens in technological decisions, and the technologies of human enhancement.
Download or read book Digital Sociology written by Noortje Marres and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.
Download or read book The Technological Society written by Jacques Ellul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As 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
Download or read book Risk and Technological Culture written by Joost Van Loon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question as to whether we are now entering a risk society has become a key debate in contemporary social theory. Risk and Technological Culture presents a critical discussion of the main theories of risk from Ulrich Becks foundational work to that of his contemporaries such as Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash and assesses the extent to which risk has impacted on modern societies. In this discussion van Loon demonstrates how new technologies are transforming the character of risk and examines the relationship between technological culture and society through substantive chapters on topics such as waste, emerging viruses, communication technologies and urban disorders. In so doing this innovative new book extends the debate to encompass theorists such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard.
Download or read book Race After Technology written by Ruha Benjamin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.
Download or read book Living in a Material World written by Trevor Pinch and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on the tools of science and technology studies and economic sociology to reconceptualize the intersection of economy and technology, suggesting materiality - the idea that social existence involves not only actors and social relations but also objects - as the theoretical point of convergence.
Download or read book Technology and Social Change written by Harvey Russell Bernard and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Movements and New Technology written by Victoria Carty and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology written by Michel Callon and published by Springer. This book was released on 1986-09-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of works regarding the interactions of science, technology, and society.
Download or read book Social Theory after the Internet written by Ralph Schroeder and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-01-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses. Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role of the internet, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.
Download or read book New Media and Society written by Deana A. Rohlinger and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sociological approach to understanding new media’s impact on society We use cell phones, computers, and tablets to access the Internet, read the news, watch television, chat with our friends, make our appointments, and post on social networking sites. New media provide the backdrop for most of our encounters. We swim in a technological world yet we rarely think about how new media potentially change the ways in which we interact with one another or shape how we live our lives. In New Media and Society, Deana Rohlinger provides a sociological approach to understanding how new media shape our interactions, our experiences, and our institutions. Using case studies and in-class exercises, Rohlinger explores how new media alter everything from our relationships with friends and family to our experiences in the workplace. Each chapter takes up a different topic – our sense of self and our relationships, education, religion, law, work, and politics – and assesses how new media alter our worlds as well as our expectations and experiences in institutional settings. Instead of arguing that these changes are “good” or “bad” for American society, the book uses sociological theory to challenge readers to think about the consequences of these changes, which typically have both positive and negative aspects. New Media and Society begins with a brief explanation of new media and social institutions, highlighting how sociologists understand complex, changing relationships. After outlining the influence of new media on our identities and relationships, it discusses the effects new media have on how we think about education, practice our religions, understand police surveillance, conceptualize work, and participate in politics. Each chapter includes key sociological concepts, engaging activities that illustrate the ideas covered in the chapter, as well as links, films, and references to additional online material.
Download or read book Society and Technological Change written by Rudi Volti and published by Worth. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society and Technological Change is the best text available for undergraduate courses exploring the relationship between societal and technological change Brimming with Rudi Volti’s expertise and enthusiasm for its dynamic subject, this always timely volume helps students grasp the vast societal implications of a wide range of technological breakthroughs, both historic and contemporary.
