Technology and the Trajectory of Myth

Technology and the Trajectory of Myth PDF

Author: David Grant

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1785369970

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book presents an entirely new way of understanding technology, as the successor to the dominant ideologies that have underpinned the thought and practices of the Western world. Like the preceding ideologies of Deity, State and Market, technology displays the features of a modern myth, promising to deal with our existential concerns on condition of our subjection to them. Utilising robust empirical evidence, Lyria Bennett Moses and David Grant argue that the pathway out of this mythological maze is the production of means to establish a new sense of political, corporate and personal self-responsibility.

The Myths of Technology

The Myths of Technology PDF

Author: Judith Burnett

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9781433101281

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book questions whether technologies are the rational, tangible, scientific, forward-thinking, neutral objects they are so often perceived to be, exploring instead how powerful, mythic ideas about technologies drive our social understanding and our expectations of them. Against a rising tide of information, we encounter significant technological, scientific, and medical advances which promise to create an educated, humane, and equal world. This book explores that promise, deconstructing technologies to conclude that though they do afford us significant and empowering advances, they remain largely cloaked in mystery, and often promise more than they can deliver. Contributors from diverse intellectual backgrounds and political and epistemological stances - spanning sociology and psychosocial investigations, innovation studies, and scientists - combine philosophical inquiry and empirical case studies to create a book which is at once provocative, innovative, and exciting in the challenges it poses.

Future Hype

Future Hype PDF

Author: Bob Seidensticker

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2006-04-13

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1576758001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Outlines methodologies for diagnosing and dealing with the "hidden" or covert factors that can subtly sabotage even the most meticulously planned change processes.

Privacy in the Age of Neuroscience

Privacy in the Age of Neuroscience PDF

Author: David Grant

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 110885818X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Neuroscience has begun to intrude deeply into what it means to be human, an intrusion that offers profound benefits but will demolish our present understanding of privacy. In Privacy in the Age of Neuroscience, David Grant argues that we need to reconceptualize privacy in a manner that will allow us to reap the rewards of neuroscience while still protecting our privacy and, ultimately, our humanity. Grant delves into our relationship with technology, the latest in what he describes as a historical series of 'magnitudes', following Deity, the State and the Market, proposing the idea that, for this new magnitude (Technology), we must control rather than be subjected to it. In this provocative work, Grant unveils a radical account of privacy and an equally radical proposal to create the social infrastructure we need to support it.

The Western Devaluation of Knowledge

The Western Devaluation of Knowledge PDF

Author: Charles B. Osburn

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-12-05

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1442228806

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Western Devaluation of Knowledge is an exploration of the causes and effects of Western cultural changes that have evolved during the past half millennium of industrialization to diminish the value of knowledge as process. Western culture has developed a conceptualization and valuation of knowledge that reverses the traditional knowledge continuum that connects data (information) to understanding. As a result, we displace the subjective and human features of knowledge with automated systems that conforms with information and devalues the knowledge process. This book explains this change as a result of the industrial influences that began to gain strength in the 15th century and continued on that path through today’s economic and cultural globalization. The author shows that science and technology, while bringing good on many fronts have also: Weakened or replaced traditional sources of cultural authority, Advanced a materialistic outlook; Hastened the broad spread of capitalist values, principles, and strategies; Fostered a pervasive dependence on technological innovation; and Nurtured an extreme rationality. Osburn shows that while any one of the above cultural currently would have been sufficient to cause deep and generalized change, their confluence was the deciding inspiration for a different epistemology, one that has altered the generally accepted meaning and valuation of knowledge.

The Enchantments of Technology

The Enchantments of Technology PDF

Author: Lee Bailey

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2005-09-14

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0252029852

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In The Enchantments of Technology, Lee Worth Bailey erases the conventional distinction between myth and machine in order to explore the passionate foundations concealed in technological culture and address its complex ethical, moral and social implications. Bailey argues that technological society does not simply disenchant the world with its reductive methods and mechanical metaphors, then shape machines with political motives, but is also borne by a deeper, subversive undertow of enchantment. Addressing examples to explore the complexities of these enchantments, his thought is full of illuminating examinations of seductively engaging technologies ranging from the old camera obscura to new automobiles, robots, airplanes, and spaceships. This volume builds on the work of numerous scholars, including Jacques Ellul and Jean Brun on the phenomenological and spiritual aspects of technology, Carl Jung on the archetypal collective unconscious approach to myth, and Martin Heidegger on Being itself. Bailey creates a dynamic, interdisciplinary, postmodern examination of how our machines and their environments embody not only reason, but also desires.

Technology and Nationalism

Technology and Nationalism PDF

Author: Marco Adria

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2010-01-28

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0773580409

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Revisiting Marshall McLuhan's work on the ways that technologies influence societies, Adria reconsiders the effects technologies have had on Canadian regionalism and nationalism. Offering key insights into media history, the author outlines the influence that newspapers, radio, and television have had in forming a mindset ready to welcome the internet age. As the digital revolution continues to shape the world into a global village, Technology and Nationalism provides a detailed and overdue reflection on the influence of technology on the social and political bonds we form and inhabit.

Average Joe

Average Joe PDF

Author: Shawn Livermore

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1119618878

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The book covers numerous tech entrepreneurial founders and software developers, and the exciting brands or products that they created. It goes deep on a handful of them, narrowly divulging exactly how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more. It highlights and unpacks the general hero-worship that the media and our own minds practice about tech founders and tech entrepreneurs. This idealization of tech success can create a paradox, preventing average tech professionals from their own successful journeys. This book provides hard evidence that anyone in tech can create, and anyone on the peripheral of tech can break through to the center where innovation, creativity, and opportunity meet. The anecdotes, stories, evidence, facts, arguments, logic, principles, and techniques provided in this book have helped individuals and businesses engage in slow creation cycles, improve the morale of their development teams, and increased their delivery potential of their technology solutions overall. Average Joe covers: Genius - The systematic deconstruction and debunking of the commonly held assumptions in the tech industry around supreme intelligence, and how that intelligence has been worshipped and sought after, despite the facts. Slow Creation - How to force-manufacture creative ideation. How conscious and subconscious cycles of patterns, details, and secrets can lead to breakthrough innovations, and how those P.D.S. cycles, and systematic mental grappling, can be conjured and repeated on a regular basis. Little-C Creativity - The conscious and miniature moments of epiphany that leak into our active P.D.S. cycles of Slow Creation. Flow - Why it's great, but also - why it's completely unreliable and unnecessary. How to perpetually innovate without relying on a flow state. Team Installation - How teams and companies can engage their employees in Slow Creation to unlock dormant ideas, stir up creative endeavors, and jumpstart fragile ideas into working products. User Manipulation - How tech products are super-charged with tricks, secret techniques, and neural transmitters like Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Cortisol; how those products leverage cognitive mechanisms and psychological techniques to force user adoption and user behaviors. Contrarianism - How oppositional and backward-thinking leaders create brand-new categories and the products which dominate those categories. Showmanship - How tech players have presented their ideas to the world, conjured up magic, manufactured mystique, and presented compelling stories that have captured their audiences. Sustainable Mystique Triad – A simple model for capturing audiences consistently without relying on hype and hustle.