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Techno-Anthropological Problems and Theories (Introduction (Conception of…

- - - - Socially sesponsible solutions
      - Involving different groups
      - Great robustness due to broad foundation
      - Contribution in everything from problem analysis to solution design
    - - Interdisciplinary thinking
      - Empirical studies show technology as entangled with sociality and society
      - Robust and responsible require interdisciplinary solutions
    - - As observers
      - As creators
      - As organizers
      - As designers
      - Work mainly consist of connecting and conveying types of expertise and knowledge practices through to understading different perspectives
    - - Aspiring to be bridge builders and collaborators
      - Team-players enabling the group members different skill-sets
    - - Technology developers
      - Recipients and users
      - Regulative and supporting agencies
- - - - (1) Looking for a way in
      - (2) When enough is never enough
      - (3) The first rule of method
- - - - The questions raised in Love Canal are today more urgent than ever, because many of the problems contemporary science faces have similarities to the Love Canal case, characterized by complexity and uncertainty.
      - A questions about objectivity and values, and whether it is possible to seperate these to.
      - Was Love Canal a safe place to live?
      - Seperation between finding facts and making decisions.
    - - 1890's Part of the river is changed to be broader and perhaps less deep.
      - 1905 Hooker Electrochemical Company is founded on the banks of the canal. They produce caustic soda and chlorine among other things.
      - 1942-1952 it was permitted to dispose 22.000 tons of chemical waste in the canal.
      - 1953 the canal is filled with soil and clay and the local school buys the land for one dollar. In the contract it is noted that the company hold no responsibilities / liabilities for the ground.
      - 1955 The school is completed and educates 400 children. Sourounding the school a community pops up with modest houses.
      - 1970 the consequences of living on the chemical dump becomes more visible. After heavy rains chemical odors would arise.
      - 1976 first investigation is carried out. The neighborhood is visited several times.
      - 1978 summer. Newspapers are printing the story forcing the state department of health to act. More than 80 chemical substances are found, out of which 10 is known to be carcinogenic.
      - 1978 Fall. First investigations are published and decides that the area is safe. After this follows a couple of years of battle between authorities, scientists and residents.
      - 1980's. The neighborhood wins, and the government find funds to relocate all residents. Love Canal is vacant today.
      - The residents find that outbursts of i.e. miscarries follows a specific geographical pattern of 'wet homes'. Scientists employed by the State department completely rejects all findings on the basis of evidence being collected by housewives.
      - Lois Gibbs leads the residents case, through organizing the neighborhood, and connecting to different scientists who might have interests in the case. Among other she teams up with Beverly Paigen a researcher from nearby area who were investigating relationships between toxins and cancer.
      - The scientific dispute arises between how the chemical waste 'travels' or spreads. The state scientists assumed this would happen from the factory radially, whereas Paigen and Gibbs argued that it would happen in narrow pathways.
    - - Paigen
        
        Her original idea of the controversy was that it was founded in a scientific disagreement. But she came to realize that it could not be resolved through presenting scientific evidence, as it was more a question of values
        
        One difference were in their basic assumptions, where the State Department scientists believed the spread were homogeneously outward from the waste site. Paigen on the contrary believed the spread were centered around the swales
        
        The second difference were their views concerning the burden of proof and the use of statistics. Inlayed in this disagreement were both parties notion of using conservative scientific approach, but disagreeing in the meaning of this.
        
        The state Department scientists claimed that one most be very cautious in claiming the site to be unsafe
        
        Paigen claimed that one should be very cautious to claim that Love Canal was a safe place to live
        
        Underestimating the danger was worse than groundless fear
      - Levine about the position of the Department of Health Scientists
        
        Dealt with numbers, and only numbers
        
        Political and social matters were extraneous to the DOH (Department of Health).
      - Pielke's Positions
        
        Pure Scientists (The DOH scientists)
        
        Their role is to sum up the state of knowledge of a limited area, and leave it to the politicians to make decisions.
        
        Issue Advocates (Paigen)
        
        Take wider political and social concerns into consideration, and take sides in a controversy, and use their expert knowledge to pursue the political agenda that they support
        
        Honest Brokers
        
        Take wider political and social concerns into consideration. But restrict themselves to pointing to the relationship between various options and political agendas.
    - - Def.: In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
      - Implications
      - COMEST / Rio declarations
    - - Precondition for PP
        
        Nature is complex and uncertainty cannot be eliminated
        
        Lorenz Small errors in simple deterministic system may obstruct exact predictions (butterfly effect)
        
        Poincaré Deterministic systems can become unstable.
        
        Newton completed scientific revolution by saying classical mechanics are deterministic
        
        Nature is limited and vulnerable
        
        Carson's book Silent Spring
        
        Organismic view from Antiquity through Middle Ages.
        
        Mechanistic view emerging in 17th century regarding nature as a machine, introducing clockwork metaphor. Nature is here regarded as a resource that can be exploited for the benefit of men
        
        Organismic View slowly combatting the mechanical one, and emerging through these days.
      - Justifications of PP
        
        We have responsibility for both nature and future generations
        
        Hans Jonas (1984) author of The Imperative of Responsibility and German philosopher
        
        Responsibility as foundation of ethics, rather than requirement of autonomy to become subject to ethics.
        
        Responsibility as concept
        
        Asymmetrical - A can be responsible for B, without B being responsible for A.
        
        Act so that the effects of your action are consistent
        with a continuing genuine life on earth. (Jonas 1984)
        
        More important to prevent harm than to promote utility.
        
        Tranøy (1967)
        
        Applies asymmetric concepts known from Kant's philosophy to fundamental ethical pairs of concepts, such as life/death, pleasure/pain.
        
        Argues that it is easier to find a negative formulation rather than a positive one.
    - - Type II - False Negative
        
        Consumer Risk
      - Type I - False Positive
        
        Producer Risk
      - Relationship or trade-off between the two types of errors
    - - Kristin Shrader-Frechette (1991) philosopher and author of the book Risk and Rationality.
        
        Better to overestimate danger than underestimate it
      - ASA (American Stastistical Association)
        
        Let’s be clear. Nothing in the ASA statement is new. Statisticians and others have been sounding the alarm about these matters for decades, to little avail. We hoped that a statement from the world’s largest professional association of statisticians would open a fresh discussion and draw renewed and vigorous attention to changing the practice of science with regards to the use of statistical inference.
    - - 3 Types of uncertainty
        
        Risk - known possible outcomes
        
        Uncertainty (known unknowns)
        
        Ignorance (unknown unknowns)
    - - Acid/radioactive rain
      - Tacit knowledge, and applying models in fields in which the researcher is the expert
      - Kuhn about paradigms and how researchers are raised and their tacit knowledge is shaped to their specific field
    - - First Lesson: Scientists are not outside
      - Second lesson: Inform about uncertainty
      - Third lesson: Laypeople should be involved
  - - - Why do bus stops often become the place for homeless to sleep?
        
        Offers shelter from the whether, by offering roof and walls
        
        Has bench for laying down
        
        Often somewhat public, thus contributing with a feeling of safety
        
        Antiloitering laws and regulations is often not applicable at bus stops, due to valid excuse/reason for spending time there
      - Donna Haraway urges to recognize technology’s “noninnocence.
      - Unearthing immoral and unjust designs and agendas
    - - Defining homelessness
        
        Unhoused
        
        Unsheltered homeless people
        
        Sheltered homeless people
        
        Chronically homeless
      - Refers to a technology's capacity to be taken up for different uses and to be meaningful in different ways
        
        Abstract Ability
        
        Concrete materiality
        
        Dominant Purposes
      - Philosophy of Technology
        
        Problem: Neither seeing it as completely determining the tomorrow of men nor entirely innocent of such determinations
        
        Views
        
        Dystopian determinists Seeing technology as carrying us towards our doom, with no possible way out.
        
        Instrumentalists - Technology as playing no role in shaping lives, and a thing that can never hold responsibility for anything.
        
        Contemporary thought - Neither deterministic nor instrumentalistic. Contemporary work attempts to tell a story in which neither we completely control technology nor it completely controls us.
        
        Utopian determinists - Seeing technology as increasingly solving our problems, rather independently of our actions.
        
        Borgmann - If there is one thing that the significant philosophers of technology agree on, it is this: Contemporary culture is pervasively technological, and technology is non neutral.
      - Don Ihde
        
        No technology is 'one thing', nor is it incapable of belonging to mulitple contexts.
        
        Phenomenology
        
        Technologies play a mediating role in human experiences
        
        Dominant being the common usage.
        Dominant stability will often be the purpose for which the device has been designed.
      - Peter-Paul Verbeek
        
        Through technological mediation that the user and the world become who they are
        
        When a technological artifact is used, it facilitates people's involvement with reality, and in doing so it coshapes how humans can be present in their world and their world for them.
      - Public Space
        
        interlocking dominant stabilities
        
        well-developed alternative stability
- - - - Choice between
        
        Incorporation
        
        Excorporation
      - Concepts
        
        Programs
        
        Anti-programs
        
        Anti-anti-programs
        
        Predictable
        
        Translation
        
        Displcaement?
        
        Detour
        
        Return
        
        Transmitted
        
        Transforms
        
        Transport
        
        Statement
        
        A gradient that carries us from words to things and from things to words
        
        Anything that is thrown, sent or delegated
        
        Meaning can vary along the way, and it does so as a function of the load imposed by the enunciator
        
        Division between naked and loaded statements
        
        Successions
        
        Actant
        
        Infrastructure
        
        Superstructure
      - First principle: The fate of a statement is in the hands of others (Latour 1987)
      - Main two dimensions
        
        Association
        
        Substitution
    - - a) Trajectory or Translation
      - b) Forms or contents
      - c) Social context or techical content
      - d) Realistic or unrealistic
      - e) Slow or fast
    - - a) Defining actors by the list of their trials
        
        def. Actant
      - b) Following the relativist variations of translation
        
        'The present king of France is Bald'
- - - - Technology transfer between Sweden and Nicaragua