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Society and Technological Change, Fourth Edition

Author: Rudi Volti

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781572599529

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Argues that society pushes for technological change that, in turn, shapes society.

Technology and Society

Author: Deborah G. Johnson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-10-17

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 0262303388

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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.

Retooling

Author: Rosalind Williams

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2003-08-11

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0262731630

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A humanistic account of the changing role of technology in society, by a historian and a former Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT. When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family's farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis's granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather's and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life. Rosalind Williams served as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT from 1995 through 2000. From this vantage point, she watched a wave of changes, some planned and some unexpected, transform many aspects of social and working life—from how students are taught to how research and accounting are done—at this major site of technological innovation. In Retooling, she uses this local knowledge to draw more general insights into contemporary society's obsession with technology. Today technology-driven change defines human desires, anxieties, memories, imagination, and experiences of time and space in unprecedented ways. But technology, and specifically information technology, does not simply influence culture and society; it is itself inherently cultural and social. If there is to be any reconciliation between technological change and community, Williams argues, it will come from connecting technological and social innovation—a connection demonstrated in the history that unfolds in this absorbing book.

Innovation and Its Enemies

Author: Calestous Juma

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-06-06

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0190467053

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It is a curious situation that technologies we now take for granted have, when first introduced, so often stoked public controversy and concern for public welfare. At the root of this tension is the perception that the benefits of new technologies will accrue only to small sections of society, while the risks will be more widely distributed. Drawing from nearly 600 years of technology history, Calestous Juma identifies the tension between the need for innovation and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order, and stability as one of today's biggest policy challenges. He reveals the extent to which modern technological controversies grow out of distrust in public and private institutions and shows how new technologies emerge, take root, and create new institutional ecologies that favor their establishment in the marketplace. Innovation and Its Enemies calls upon public leaders to work with scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to manage technological change and expand public engagement on scientific and technological matters.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems, anniversary edition

Author: Wiebe E. Bijker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-05-18

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 0262517604

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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.

Technology and American Society

Author: Gary Cross

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-21

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1351249096

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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.