Social Research articles from September 1997

Social Research archives from September 1997

Social contexts of technology.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... Not long ago fellow contributor Leo Marx introduced my theme with a provocative question: "Why not start with the intuitively compelling idea that technology may be the truly distinctive feature of modernity?" (Marx, 1992, p. 407). But welcome as...

Technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... ". . . the essence of technology is by no means anything technological." --Heidegger(1) New Concepts as Historical Markers The history of technology is one of those subjects that most of us know more about than we...

Technology today: utopia or dystopia?(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... On the cathode-ray tube in front of her flashes an image of an envelope with a handwritten address--upside down. The woman touches the keyboard, flipping the picture 180 degrees. She reads the sloppy script and presses several more keys. The...

Technology and the rest of culture: keynote.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... I have trouble understanding the title to my own article. What do these two much-used terms--technology and culture--really mean? My favorite definition of technology comes from John Kenneth Galbraith: the application of organized knowledge....

From the printed word to the moving image.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... I was asked to discuss how the changes wrought by the advent of printing might be related to the likely consequences of current innovations in communications technology. As is so often the ,case, no sooner had I accepted the invitation than I...

Shaping communication networks: telegraph, telephone, computer.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... Technologies are social constructions. Machines are not like meteors that come unbidden from outside and have an "impact." Rather, human beings make many choices when inventing, marketing, and using a new device. The telephone and telegraph,...

Computational technologies and images of the self.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... Computers offer themselves as models of mind and as "objects to think with" for thinking about the self. They do this in several ways. There is, first of all, the world of artificial intelligence research--Marvin Minsky once called it the...

Technology and culture.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... We're always trying to understand why people do the things they do. It would help us to know much more about the machinery inside our brains. But lacking that knowledge, we're forced, instead, to invent simpler explanations. This often leads...

Three laboratories.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... 1. Hierarchy and Homogeneity In all too many realms of the history of technology and science, historians have reenacted the social relations of the disciplines about which they write. For many years, scientists looked down on engineers as...

Science and technology: biology and biotechnology.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... I have understood science to mean our effort to comprehend ourselves and the world we inhabit and to try to make or impose some sense on it. When Einstein winced at the thought that God might play dice, he was reflecting a deep unease about...

Exaggerated hopes and baseless fears.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... This article investigates thoughts and themes that I have encountered recently concerning technology and culture, focusing most heavily on two ideas that are particularly contentious. The first is the thought that the communicative...

Constitutional law and new technology.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... How are new technologies assimilated into American constitutional law doctrines, particularly new communications technologies? I doubt that there is a single, generalizable process for this, true for all new technologies and all constitutional...

Technology and philosophy.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... Let us begin with a general definition of the word technology. In its current meaning, it names the means or methods used to help people move from place to place, communicate, produce, construct, create, fabricate, but also destroy; to observe,...

Literature and technology: nature's "lawful offspring in man's art."(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... My rubric may be thought to cover at least three different questions, each of them vast and complex. The first concerns the technologies contributing to and shaping the formation of the activities and institutions of literature throughout...

The arrival of the machine: modernist art in Europe, 1910-25.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... I approach the subject of art and technology rather like one of the blind men in the old story about the discovery of the elephant. The whole beast is too large to encompass at once, yet if I put my hand on the trunk I won't be describing the...

Technology and democracy.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... (T)he Internet may fairly be regarded as a never ending worldwide conversation.--ALA v. Department of Justice, 929 F.Supp. 824 (E.D.Pa. 1996)...

Technology and capitalism.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... If there is one thing we have all learned from these pages, it is that the word technology has many facets. Yet, one aspect of this many, many-sided term deserves an examination it has not received. This is the relation between technology and...

Technology and value.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... I propose to identify three issues and address one. The first concerns the relationship between technological leadership, on the one side, and the frontier between the public and private sectors. The second calls into question the triumph of...

Liberal maps for technology's powers: six questions.(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
September 22, 1997... I want to inquire about the relationship between two not entirely autonomous developments: the radical transformations convened by high technology, especially to the means and terms of communications, and the victory of liberal over totalitarian...