Download or read book Technological Culture and the Human Prospect written by Carolyn Merchant and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Technological Culture and the Human Prospect written by James Steve Counelis and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Living in a Technological Culture written by Hans Oberdiek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-02 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology is no longer confined to the laboratory but has become an established part of our daily lives. Its sophistication offers us power beyond our human capacity which can either dazzle or threaten; it depends who is in control. Living in a Technological Culture challenges traditionally held assumptions about the relationship between `man-and-machine'. It argues that contemporary science does not shape technology but is shaped by it. Neither discipline exists in a moral vacuum, both are determined by politics rather than scientific inquiry. By questioning our existing uses of technology, this book opens up wider debate on the shape of things to come and whether we should be trying to change them now. As an introduction to the philosophy of technology this will be valuable to students, but will be equally engaging for the general reader.
Download or read book The Culture of Technology written by Arnold Pacey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1985-09-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Culture of Technology examines our often conflicting attitudes toward nuclear weapons, biological technologies, pollution, Third World development, automation, social medicine, and industrial decline. It disputes the common idea that technology is "value-free" and shows that its development and use are conditioned by many factors-political and cultural as well as economic and scientific. Many examples from a variety of cultures are presented. These range from the impact of snowmobiles in North America to the use of water pumps in rural India, and from homemade toys in Africa to electricity generation in Britain-all showing how the complex interaction of many influences in every community affects technological practice. Arnold Pacey, who lives near Oxford, England, has a degree in physics and has lectured on both the history of technology and technology policy, with a particular focus on the development of technologies appropriate to Third World needs. He is the author of The Maze of Ingenuity (MIT Press paperback).
Download or read book Science Technology and the Human Prospect written by Chauncey Starr and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science, Technology and the Human Prospect contains the proceedings of the Edison Centennial Symposium. Organized into three parts, this book begins with the 10 essays commissioned from scholars and persons richly experienced in the management of technology. Part I explores the costs and benefits of technology. Part II addresses the adaption of the institutional frame of technology. The last part discusses the human needs and future of invention.
Download or read book Technology and the Human Prospect written by Christopher Freeman and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1986 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technological change, economic growth, OECD countries - microelectronics, Innovation, industrial research, science policy, technology, research and development, unemployment, employment trends, business cycle, economic theory. References. Festschrift.
Download or read book Technology and the Human Prospect written by Roy M. MacLeod and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Prometheanism written by Christopher John Müller and published by Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A translation of the essay 'On Promethean Shame' by Günther Anders with a comprehensive introduction and analysis of his work.
Download or read book Technopoly written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it—with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.
Download or read book In the Shadow of Progress written by Eric Cohen and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2008-07-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of unprecedented human mastery -- over birth and death, body and mind, nature and human nature. In every realm of life, science and technology have brought remarkable advances and improvements: we are healthier, wealthier, and more comfortable than ever before. But our gratitude for the benefits of progress increasingly mixes with concern about the meaning and consequences of our newfound powers. If we can dream about a new age of genetic medicine, we can also shudder at a new age of weapons of mass destruction. As we welcome longer lives, we wonder if we will still value human life as we should. In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology is a deep and lively reflection on the moral challenges of the technological age. Eric Cohen, a leading voice in America's bioethics debates, offers a tour of the complex dilemmas at the intersection of science and morality, moving seamlessly from contemporary subjects like stem cells and evolution to classic texts like the Hebrew Bible and Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis." Why are the wealthiest people in human history the least likely to want children? What kind of civilization will we become if we seek cures for the sick by destroying human embryos? What is lost when we relieve human sadness by altering the chemical balance of the brain, or enhance human performance by altering the biological workings of the body? In this age of scientific wonders, have we forgotten what sets human beings apart from everything else in the natural world? Can the fruits of modern science ever satisfy our deepest longings -- for love, for virtue, and for transcendence? In the end, Cohen argues, there are no easy answers. Our challenge is to live simultaneously with gratitude and fear, pride and shame, sobriety and hope, in this new age of technology.
Download or read book Technology and Culture written by and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Humanity Faces a Technological Culture written by Mario George Salvadori and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Tech Humanist How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans written by Kate O'Neill and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology drives the future we create. But are we steering that technology in directions that create that future in the best way, for the most people? In her new book
Download or read book Humans at Work in the Digital Age written by Shawna Ross and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans at Work in the Digital Age explores the roots of twenty-first-century cultures of digital textual labor, mapping the diverse physical and cognitive acts involved, and recovering the invisible workers and work that support digital technologies. Drawing on 14 case studies organized around four sites of work, this book shows how definitions of labor have been influenced by the digital technologies that employees use to produce, interpret, or process text. Incorporating methodology and theory from a range of disciplines and highlighting labor issues related to topics as diverse as census tabulation, market research, electronic games, digital archives, and 3D modeling, contributors uncover the roles played by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics in determining how narratives of digital labor are constructed and erased. Because each chapter is centered on the human cost of digital technologies, however, it is individual people immersed in cultures of technology who are the focus of the volume, rather than the technologies themselves. Humans at Work in the Digital Age shows how humanistic inquiry can be a valuable tool in the emerging conversation surrounding digital textual labor. As such, this book will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of digital humanities; human-computer interaction; digital culture and social justice; race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital realms; the economics of the internet; and technology in higher education.
Download or read book The Human Factor written by Kim Vicente and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2004-07-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What links the frustrations of daily life, like VCR clocks and voicemail systems, to airplane crashes and a staggering “hidden epidemic” of medical error? Kim Vicente is a professor of human factors engineering at the University of Toronto and a consultant to NASA, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and many other organizations; he might also be described as a “technological anthropologist.” He spends his time in emergency rooms, airplane cockpits and nuclear power station control rooms -- as well as in kitchens, garages and bathrooms -- observing how people interact with technology. In the first chapter of The Human Factor, Kim Vicente sets out the disturbing pattern he’s observed: from daily life to life-or-death situations, people are using technology that doesn’ t take the human factor into account. Technologies as diverse as stove tops, hospital work schedules and airline cockpit controls lead to ‘human error’ because they neglect what people are like physically, psychologically, and in more complex ways. The results range from inconvenience to tragic loss of life. How has this situation come about? The root cause of the problem, Vicente explains in the second chapter, is a “two cultures” issue. There is a divide in the world of technological design -- just as there is in the world more generally -- between humanistic and mechanistic world-views. The humanistic view (in, say, cognitive psychology) deals with people in the abstract, ignoring that using tools is an integral human activity. The mechanistic view, on the other hand, forgets that it is real people who have to use the tools engineers develop. The two groups aren’t talking to each other: as the author puts it, “our traditional ways of thinking have ignored -- and virtually made invisible -- the relationship between people and technology.” As is often the case in human factors engineering, the solution is both revolutionary and, on the surface, simple: what we have to do is focus on the relationship between people and technology. Taking a cue from systems thinking, Kim Vicente argues that we should focus not just on better products or better practices, but the fit between them. What this means is not the development of more high-tech or low-tech articles, but a Human-tech revolution, where the human comes before the technological but the two are always linked. In some areas the revolution is already at work: it’s not always the case that technology doesn’t take the human factor into account. When it does, as in the case of the Reach toothbrush, the Palm Pilot, or the “critical incident” reporting method developed at the Philadelphia Children’s hospital, the technology is a success. The Fender stratocaster guitar became the favourite of musicians around the globe because it was designed with the needs of guitarists in mind, in everything from its overall shape to the position of its controls. The Human-tech Aviation Safety Reporting System, a way for pilots to confidentially report near-misses, has made air travel dramatically safer. Technology as Kim Vicente understands it isn’t just the physical “stuff” we use. In The Human Factor the word is used in a much broader sense, to include the physical and non-physical elements of complex systems. Information, teamwork, organizational structures and political decisions play a crucial role in determining how well a technological system as a whole functions. The “Human-tech ladder” sets this out in more detail, and also provides the structure for the rest of the book. Design should begin by understanding a human or societal need, and then tailoring the technology to reflect what we know about human nature at the physical, psychological, team, organizational and political levels. Kim Vicente offers a host of examples of technology relating to human needs poorly and well at each level. The physical is perhaps easiest to understand: a toothbrush that fits into hard to reach parts of the human mouth is better tailored to the human body than one that cannot. At the psychological level, technology has to take into account how people process and remember information, whether in designing voicemail systems or airport baggage checks. Poor Human-tech can be devastating. For example, awkwardly placed and uninformative gauges in the design of the control room at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station left even highly trained engineers uncertain as to the status of the reactor, contributing to the infamous accident there. At the team level, the Cockpit Resource Management system is a way of training pilots to communicate and share responsibilities effectively. The way people work together is itself a form of technology that needs to run smoothly to avoid disastrous accidents, such as the time an Eastern Airlines jet crashed in Florida because the entire crew was distracted by the condition of an unimportant light bulb and no-one attended to flying the plane. Kim Vicente discusses the human factor at the organizational level in chapter seven of The Human Factor. “Soft” technology such as staffing levels and corporate culture can be designed so that an organization learns from its front-line staff. For instance, the medical community traditionally holds individual doctors and nurses responsible for mistakes. When things go wrong we tend to blame people -- when in fact they may have made heroic efforts to use poorly designed technology. Errors in hospitals are more often the result of systemic flaws: none is wholly at fault, but together they interact to cause accidents. At the Philadelphia Children’s hospital, the Human-tech solution is a system which encourages staff to make full reports on near-misses, and asks them to tell managers about potential dangers so that the hospital as a whole can institute protective measures. This critical incident technique led to a 90% reduction in medical mistakes at the hospital. The final level of human nature which The Human Factor addresses is the political. Here, a Human-tech shows us that when political elements -- laws, funding, regulations -- ignore what we know about human nature, dangers arise. In the case of the E. coli tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario, Kim Vicente uncovers a host of “system design” elements at the political level -- policy aims, legal regulations, budget allocations -- which interacted with environmental factors and staff incompetence to kill seven people and make thousands of others sick. In conclusion, Kim Vicente feels that our civilization is at a crossroads: we have to change our relationship with technology to bring an end to technology-induced death and destruction, and start to improve the lives of everyone on the planet. The final chapter of The Human Factor sets out the ways we can regain control of our lives. As consumers, we can recognize and distinguish better designed products, and buy the more Human-tech ones. By participating actively in society we can remind people that ignoring the human factor, as happened at Walkerton, has terrible implications. In our workplaces we can all ensure that more human friendly technologies, hard and soft, predominate. Companies need to take a Human-tech approach to the rules and practices they institute, and design soft systems to guarantee that their employees have the competencies, information, goals and commitment to do their jobs. Other bodies, from the media to engineering schools can all play their part in making technology with a close affinity to human nature the norm rather than a rarity: a better world will be the inevitable result.
Download or read book Interface Culture written by Steven A. Johnson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1999-10-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on his own expertise in the humanities and on the Web, Steven Johnson not only demonstrates how interfaces - those buttons, graphics, and words on the computer screen through which we control information - influence our daily lives, but also tracks their roots back to Victorian novels, early cinema, and even medieval urban planning. The result is a lush cultural and historical tableau in which today's interfaces take their rightful place in the lineage of artistic innovation. With a distinctively accessible style, Interface Culture brings new intellectual depth to the vital discussion of how technology has transformed society, and is sure to provoke wide debate in both literary and technological circles.
Download or read book The New Culture written by Weiping Sun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary China, in an era of globalization and in the midst of transition, now faces both great opportunities and unprecedented challenges. People are more and more becoming “economic man,” “technological man” and “one-dimensional man,” and are increasingly losing the virtue, dignity and beauty of human nature. When humanity’s habitat grows smaller and smaller as economic, technological, informational and social interaction become more and more intense, while conflicts of interest and clashing values are growing increasingly heated, how should different religions, national groups and states deal with each other? As environmental pollution worsens, our ecosystem becomes increasingly unstable and population growth becomes an unbearable burden, where shall we look for a homeland where we can rest our weary minds? ... To answer these daunting questions and address their attendant challenges, all human activities, including institutional arrangements, economic constructions, and science and the arts, must all start from the change of humankind, re-think the true nature of humankind and its needs, and consider the prospect of humankind evolving into a “better humankind.” This book is an exploration of such inquires.
