Download or read book Technology and the Rest of Culture written by Arien Mack and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the printing press to Palm Pilots, we often rush to embrace new inventions that promise to make life easier. Yet the history of modern warfare suggests that new technologies can also have drastic and dire consequences. Technology and the Rest of Culture explores this tension by identifying the many ways in which technology shapes our society, investigating whether culture has an impact on the rate and direction of technological achievement, and describing how technology seems to have taken on a life and culture of its own. Nicholas Humphrey, Marvin Minsky, Peter Galison, and Joshua Lederberg explore the complex relationship between science and technology, showing that scientific advancement has often followed technological achievements, rather than the other way around. Ira Katznelson, Alan Ryan, Paul Gewirtz, and Robert McC. Adams consider how shifts in the means and terms of communication affect democracy, free expression, and the law. Rosalind Williams, George Kateb, John Hollander, and Robert L. Herbert challenge the notion that technological images and themes express primarily logic, utility, functionality, and rationality, asserting instead that violent, aggressive, and destructive images are all too often the end result of technology. At times somber, at times playful, but always challenging and thought-provoking, Technology and the Rest of Culture culls many academic disciplines to discover important elements about one of the most central characteristics of life in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Technology and the Rest of Culture written by Conference on Technology and the Rest of Culture (1997, New York, NY) and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Built World written by Thomas P. Hughes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-05-13 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
Download or read book Technology and Culture written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Cultural Heritage in a Changing World written by Karol Jan Borowiecki and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central purpose of this collection of essays is to make a creative addition to the debates surrounding the cultural heritage domain. In the 21st century the world faces epochal changes which affect every part of society, including the arenas in which cultural heritage is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited, or simply exists. The book is about these changes; about the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual; about the questions which the advent of digital technologies is demanding that we ask and answer in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has enormous potential in terms of its contribution to improving the quality of life for people, understanding the past, assisting territorial cohesion, driving economic growth, opening up employment opportunities and supporting wider developments such as improvements in education and in artistic careers. Given that spectrum of possible benefits to society, the range of studies that follow here are intended to be a resource and stimulus to help inform not just professionals in the sector but all those with an interest in cultural heritage.
Download or read book Cultural Technologies written by Göran Bolin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume discuss both the culture of technology that we live in today, and culture as technology. Within the chapters of the book cultures of technology and cultural technologies are discussed, focussing on a variety of examples, from varied national contexts. The book brings together internationally recognised scholars from the social sciences and humanities, covering diverse themes such as intellectual property, server farms and search engines, cultural technologies and epistemology, virtual embassies, surveillance, peer-to-peer file-sharing, sound media and nostalgia and much more. It contains both historical and contemporary analyses of technological phenomena as well as epistemological discussions on the uses of technology.
Download or read book Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation written by Helga Nowotny and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chiefly papers presented at a conference held at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany, in April 2003.
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 Living in a Technological Culture written by Mary Tiles and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging traditionally held assumptions about the relationship between "man and machine" this book opens up wider debate on the shape of things to come and whether we should be trying to change them now.
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 A Culture of Improvement written by Robert Douglas Friedel and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2007 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technological change in the West has been driven by the pursuit of improvement: a history of technology, from plows and printing presses to penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the computer.
Download or read book Leonardo to the Internet written by Thomas J. Misa and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now updated — A comprehensive, 500-year history of technology in society. Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls "the question of technology." In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. Each chapter has been honed to relate to contemporary concerns. Globalization, Misa argues, looks differently considering today's virulent nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and trade wars. A new chapter focuses on the digital age from 1990 to 2016. The book also examines how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks, and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability and takes a look at the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of Wuhan, China's high-tech district. A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world.
Download or read book Human Built World written by Thomas P. Hughes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-07-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
Download or read book Technology and Culture written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Strange Weather written by Andrew Ross and published by Verso. This book was released on 1991-09-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who speaks for science in a technologically dominated society? In his latest work of cultural criticism Andrew Ross contends that this question yields no simple or easy answer. In our present technoculture a wide variety of people, both inside and outside the scientific community, have become increasingly vocal in exercising their right to speak about, on behalf of, and often against, science and technology. Arguing that science can only ever be understood as a social artifact, Strange Weather is a manifesto which calls on cultural critics to abandon their technophobia and contribute to the debates which shape our future. Each chapter focuses on an idea, a practice or community that has established an influential presence in our culture: New Age, computer hacking, cyberpunk, futurology, and global warming. In a book brimming over with intelligence—both human and electronic—Ross examines the state of scientific countercultures in an age when the development of advanced information technologies coexists uneasily with ecological warnings about the perils of unchecked growth. Intended as a contribution to a “green” cultural criticism, Strange Weather is a provocative investigation of the ways in which science is shaping the popular imagination of today, and delimiting the possibilities of tomorrow.
