Technology and the Rest of Culture

Technology and the Rest of Culture
Author: Arien Mack
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2001
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780814208694

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.

Technopoly

Technopoly
Author: Neil Postman
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 030779735X

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transformation into a society that is shaped by technology—from the acclaimed author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. "A provocative book ... A tool for fighting back against the tools that run our lives." —Dallas Morning News The story of our society's 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.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Author: Fred Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2010-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226817431

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

Cultural Heritage in a Changing World

Cultural Heritage in a Changing World
Author: Karol Jan Borowiecki
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2016-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319295446

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.

Race After Technology

Race After Technology
Author: Ruha Benjamin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509526439

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: www.dropbox.com

Why I Am Not a Scientist

Why I Am Not a Scientist
Author: Jonathan Marks
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-06-23
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0520259602

"Highly readable and informative, this critical series of vignettes illustrates a long history of the corruption of science by folk beliefs, careerism, and sociopolitical agendas. Marks repeatedly brings home the message that we should challenge scientists, especially molecular geneticists, before we accept their results and give millions of dollars in public and private funds toward their enterprises."—Russell Tuttle, The University of Chicago “Jonathan Marks has produced a personal and compelling story of how science works. His involvement in scientific endeavor in human biology and evolution over the past three decades and his keen sense of the workings of science make this book a must read for both scientists and lay readers. In this sense, the lay reader will learn how scientists should and shouldn't think and some scientists who read this book will come away thinking they are truly not scientists nor would they want to be.”—Rob DeSalle, American Museum of Natural History “Jonathan Marks's Why I Am Not a Scientist provides food for thought, and as expected, it's digestible. In unusually broad perspective, this anthropology of knowledge considers science and race and racism, gender, fraud, misconduct and creationism in a way that makes one proud to be called a scientist.”—George J. Armelagos, Emory University

Rest

Rest
Author: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 046509659X

"Rest is such a valuable book. If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."---Arianna Huffington, New York Times Book Review Overwork is the new normal. Rest is something to do when the important things are done—but they are never done. Looking at different forms of rest, from sleep to vacation, Silicon Valley futurist and business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang dispels the myth that the harder we work the better the outcome. He combines rigorous scientific research with a rich array of examples of writers, painters, and thinkers—from Darwin to Stephen King—to challenge our tendency to see work and relaxation as antithetical. "Deliberate rest," as Pang calls it, is the true key to productivity, and will give us more energy, sharper ideas, and a better life. Rest offers a roadmap to rediscovering the importance of rest in our lives, and a convincing argument that we need to relax more if we actually want to get more done.

The Technological Society

The Technological Society
Author: Jacques Ellul
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0593315685

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