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Do Artifacts have politics? - Coggle Diagram
Do Artifacts have politics?
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
Theory of technological politics
"...draws attention to the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical systems, to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives,..."
Naive technological determinism
the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns
Social determination of technology
What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.
DISCUSSION
This article states that the viewpoint from this article that technology can shape society with political implications (give power/take away power) and the viewpoint that society shapes the technology should not be viewed as competing viewpoints but rather as complimentary viewpoints. Do you agree with this? Or should one viewpoint be given priority over the other?
CONCLUSION
CONTEXT
Authoritarian
"As long as it exists [nuclear weapons] at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain"
Democratic
"It its vastly more reasonable to build solar systems in a desegregated, widely distributed manner than in a large-scale centralized plants"
CLASSIFICATIONS
Inherently political technologies "... the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast" (p. 104).
Technologies that are compatible with, but do not necessarily require a particular form of social order Order can be internal, e.g., to a factory, or external, e.g., to society at large.
Technologies that require (inescapably impose on us) a particular social order to function (Engel's argument)
Designs with political effects in a particular context
Designs with intended political impact
Designs without "conscious conspiracies or malicious intentions"
DEFINITIONS
POLITICS: "Arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangments" pg
TECHNOLOGIES: smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware of a specific kind.
Inherent Political Technologies: man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships