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 Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century written by Helena M. Jerónimo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume rethinks the work of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) on the centenary of his birth, by presenting an overview of the current debates based on Ellul's insights. As one of the most significant twentieth-century thinkers about technology, Ellul was among the first thinkers to realize the importance of topics such as globalization, terrorism, communication technologies and ecology, and study them from a technological perspective. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society, and addresses the reception of his work on the technological society, the notion of efficiency, the process of symbolization/de-symbolization, and ecology. The second analyzes communicational and cultural problems, as well as threats and trends in early twenty-first century societies. Many of the issues Ellul saw as crucial – such as energy, propaganda, applied life sciences and communication – continue to be so. In fact they have grown exponentially, on a global scale, producing new forms of risk. Essays in the final section examine the duality of reason and revelation. They pursue an understanding of Ellul in terms of the depth of experience and the traditions of human knowledge, which is to say, on the one hand, the experience of the human being as contained in the rationalist, sociological and philosophical traditions. On the other hand there are the transcendent roots of human existence, as well as “revealed knowledge,” in the mystical and religious traditions. The meeting of these two traditions enables us to look at Ellul’s work as a whole, but above all it opens up a space for examining religious life in the technological society.
Download or read book The Technological System written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 20 years after writing The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul realized how the totalistic dimensions of our modern technological milieu required an additional treatment of the topic. Writing amidst the rise of books in the 1970s on pollution, over-population, and environmental degradation, Ellul found it necessary, once again, to write about the global presence of technology and its far-reaching effects. The Technological System represents a new stage in Ellul’s research. Previously he studied technological society as such; in this book he approaches the topic from a systems perspective wherein he identifies the characteristics of technological phenomena and technological progress in light of system theory. This leads to an entirely new approach to what constitutes the most important event of our society which has decisive bearing on the future of our world. Ellul’s analysis touches on all aspects of modern life, not just those of a scientific or technological order. In the end, readers are compelled to formulate their own opinions and make their own decisions regarding the way a technique-based value system affects every level of human life.
Download or read book The Empire of Non sense written by Jacques Ellul and published by Papadakis Dist A/C. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many modern artists and architects continue to imagine and build the world technologically. Their beliefs remain firmly rooted in their assumption that the liberating forces of technology freed them from previous artistic traditions while making available vast means of production and a plethora of materials. All artistic traditions were seemingly put aside by the paintings of Cézanne, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. Behind this apparent freedom French critic Jacques Ellul, author of the classic The Technological Society, found an absolute slavery. The artist was the handmaiden of technology, a relation the artist no longer understood, like other citizens of technological culture. Artists acclaimed their unbridled individualism while being intensely determined by the forces of technological culture. Ellul examines this process in modern art from the beginning of the 20th century where the sense of art - its meaning and embodiments - is reduced to non-sense. Ellul's study is in the tradition of Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory but moves significantly beyond their Marxist perspectives that were, from Ellul's view, co-opted by technique.
Download or read book The Future Without a Past written by John Paul Russo and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Argues that technological imperatives like rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy have transformed the humanities and altered the relation between humans and nature. Examines technology and its impact on education, historical memory, and technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo"--Provided by publisher.
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 Democracy in a Technological Society written by Society for Philosophy & Technology (U.S.) and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1992-11-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between democracy and technology? And what should that relationship be? This book explores these questions, drawing upon a wide range of philosophical, historical and sociological points of view. In stark contrast to technology's promise as a wellspring of equality, freedom and self-government, its development now poses a host of problems for political society: an alarming concentration of power over global production, a widening gap between rich and poor, multiple environmental crises, trivialization of politics in the mass media, decline of citizen competence in decision making, and the disproportionate influence of scientific and technical elites. As the writers discuss these issues, they investigate new avenues for democratic politics, possibilities that emerge as modernist ideas about progress, justice and the common good lose their ability to guide contemporary thought and action. This book will be of interest to philosophers, political scientists, those doing research on technology and society, engineers studying human factors, environmental scientists, sociologists.
Download or read book Political Machines written by Andrew Barry and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-07-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political preoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself.In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from environmental protest to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.>
Download or read book Society and Technological Change written by Rudi Volti and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-06-07 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive introduction to the interactions of society and technology. The new fifth edition includes coverage of such timely topics as cloning, stem-cell research, genetically modified foods, terrorism, intellectual property, and the global impact of the internet.
Download or read book Handbook of Research on Technoself Identity in a Technological Society written by Luppicini, Rocci and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 874 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides insights to better enhance the understanding of technology's widespread intertwinement with human identity within an advancing technological society"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Shades of Loneliness written by Richard Stivers and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004-02-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To varying degrees, loneliness has us all in its grip. In this incisive and controversial book, Richard Stivers rejects the recent emphasis on genetic explanations of psychological problems, arguing that the very organization of technological societies is behind the pervasive experience of loneliness. The extreme rationality that governs our institutions and organizations results in abstract and impersonal relationships in much of daily life. Moreover, as common meaning is gradually eroded, our connections to others become vague and tenuous. Our ensuing fear and loneliness, however, can be masked by an outgoing, extroverted personality. In its extreme form, loneliness assumes pathological dimensions in neurosis and schizophrenia. Stivers maintains that even here the causes remain social. The various forms of neuroses and psychoses follow the key contradictions of a technological society. For instance, narcissism and depression reflect the tension between power and meaninglessness that characterizes modern societies. Stivers demonstrates that there is a continuum from the normal 'technological personality' through the various neuroses to full-blown schizophrenia. He argues that all forms of loneliness emanate from the same cause; they likewise share a common dynamic despite their differences. Loneliness, in its many manifestations, seems to be the price we must pay for living in the modern world. Yet nurturing family, friend, and community ties can mitigate its culturally and psychologically disorganizing power. This book is a clarion call for a renewal of moral awareness and custom to combat the fragmentation and depersonalization of our technological civilization.
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 Propaganda written by Jacques Ellul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seminal study and critique of propaganda from one of the greatest French philosophers of the 20th century is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1962. Taking not only a psychological approach, but a sociological approach as well, Ellul’s book outlines the taxonomy for propaganda, and ultimately, it’s destructive nature towards democracy. Drawing from his own experiences fighting for the French resistance against the Vichy regime, Ellul offers a unique insight into the propaganda machine.
Download or read book Jacques Ellul on Politics Technology and Christianity written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2005-06-16 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Final Interviews Before Jacques Ellul Died Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity is the best and most satisfying set of interviews ever carried out with Jacques Ellul and we are most fortunate to have this rich legacy of thought now available to a broader audience. Patrick Chastenet knew Ellul personally as well as intellectually. His questions display a rare balance of respect, boldness and insight that perhaps no one else could have achieved. Chastenet elicits Ellul's thoughts in Ellul's voice and refuses to edit or re-organize the text in any way that would diminish the realism and authenticity of the conversation. Chastenet truly takes the reader into Ellul's salon for a rare and wonderful experience. David W. Gill, President of the International Jacques Ellul Society Patrick Chastenet's interviews are a ""must read"" for anyone interested in Jacques Ellul or in issues pertaining to modern France. This book is full of important insights into an impressive range of issues, from technology and ecology to theology. Professor Joyce Hanks, University of Scranton Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was Professor of the History of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux, France, from the end of World War II until his retirement in 1980. He is best known for his brilliant, path-finding analysis of our world in The Technological Society (original French edition, 1954) and many other writings, such as The Technological System, The Technological Bluff, and The Political Illusion. Ellul was also a powerful lay voice for a renewed and reformed Christian theology and ethics. Many of his Christian writings, such as Presence of the Kingdom, Living Faith, and Hope in Time of Abandonment continue to challenge and inspire. For more information, visit www.ellul.org, the web site of the International Jacques Ellul Society. Patrick Troude-Chastenet is Professor of Political Science at the University of Poitiers. He studied with Professor Ellul at the Institute for Political Studies, University of Bordeaux, 1974-76. He is author of an introduction to Ellul's thought, Lire Ellul: Introduction a l'oeuvre socio-politique de Jacques Ellul (1992) and editor of two anthologies on Ellul's thought: Sur Jacques Ellul: Un penseur de notre temps (1994) and a forthcoming collection from the international colloquium at Poitiers, October 2004, entitled Jacques Ellul: Libre examen d'une pensee sans frontieres. Chastenet is the founding president of L'Association Internationale Jacques Ellul (www.jacques-ellul.org) and founding editor of the annual Cahiers Jacques Ellul. The interviews in the present volume were conducted over a fourteen-year period, 1981-1994, and were originally published as Entretiens avec Jacques Ellul (1994).
Download or read book Anarchy and Christianity written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacque Ellul blends politics, theology, history, and exposition in this analysis of the relationship between political anarchy and biblical faith. While he clarifies the views of each and how they can be related, his aim is not to proselytize either anarchists into Christianity or Christians into anarchy. On the one hand, suggests Ellul, anarchists need to understand that much of their criticism of Christianity applies only to the form of religion that developed, not to biblical faith. Christians, on the other hand, need to look at the biblical texts and not reject anarchy as a political option, for it seems closest to biblical thinking. After charting the background of his own interest in the subject, Ellul defines what he means by anarchy: the nonviolent repudiation of authority. He goes on to look at the Bible as the source of anarchy (in the sense of nondomination, not disorder), working through Old Testament history, Jesus' ministry, and finally the early church's view of power as reflected in the New Testament writings.
Download or read book Technology and American Society written by Gary Cross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing 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. 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. 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. 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.
Download or read book Teenagers and Technology written by Chris Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teenagers and Technology offers a positive overview of how technology affects the lives of young people.
