Anthropology in the Age of Technology

Anthropology in the Age of Technology PDF Author: Paul van Dijk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004495703
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book is the first to discuss, for an English-speaking audience, the ideas of the German-Jewish man of letters, thinker, and activist Günther Anders. Anders is one of few philosophers to deal intensely with the moral consequences of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He can rightly be called the philosopher of the atomic age, and his thinking a philosophy of modern technology. In biting manifestoes, sharp aphorisms, and penetrating essays, in stirring diary notes and political fables, Anders strikes out the age in which we live. As a twentieth-century visionary, he exposes the absence of the moral and social imaginations that is necessary to prevent our history from ending in a total catastrophe. In the gap between our technical creations and our utter inability to imagine their destructive potential lies the basis for the unstoppable activity of this practical philosopher. From every possible angle, he attempts to comprehend this modern schizophrenia in its roots and consequences. Anders is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He tried to describe and analyze the variety of manifestations of the “self-destructive progress of our technical civilization,” which makes humanity into an “anti-quated” sort. He diagnosed countless important problems, ranging from the world of media to the dictates of the world of machinery, and he investigated their social, political, and philosophical meaning. To read his writings is more than becoming acquainted with a rich and colorful philosopher. It is more than an encounter with a moving and passionate individual. It is ultimately a confrontation with oneself, with our own guilt and responsibility, with our personal hopes and fears, with our lack of imagination and with our need to recover it.

Anthropology in the Age of Technology

Anthropology in the Age of Technology PDF Author: Paul van Dijk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004495703
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book

Book Description
This book is the first to discuss, for an English-speaking audience, the ideas of the German-Jewish man of letters, thinker, and activist Günther Anders. Anders is one of few philosophers to deal intensely with the moral consequences of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He can rightly be called the philosopher of the atomic age, and his thinking a philosophy of modern technology. In biting manifestoes, sharp aphorisms, and penetrating essays, in stirring diary notes and political fables, Anders strikes out the age in which we live. As a twentieth-century visionary, he exposes the absence of the moral and social imaginations that is necessary to prevent our history from ending in a total catastrophe. In the gap between our technical creations and our utter inability to imagine their destructive potential lies the basis for the unstoppable activity of this practical philosopher. From every possible angle, he attempts to comprehend this modern schizophrenia in its roots and consequences. Anders is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He tried to describe and analyze the variety of manifestations of the “self-destructive progress of our technical civilization,” which makes humanity into an “anti-quated” sort. He diagnosed countless important problems, ranging from the world of media to the dictates of the world of machinery, and he investigated their social, political, and philosophical meaning. To read his writings is more than becoming acquainted with a rich and colorful philosopher. It is more than an encounter with a moving and passionate individual. It is ultimately a confrontation with oneself, with our own guilt and responsibility, with our personal hopes and fears, with our lack of imagination and with our need to recover it.

Anthropological Data in the Digital Age

Anthropological Data in the Digital Age PDF Author: Jerome W. Crowder
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030249255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
For more than two decades, anthropologists have wrestled with new digital technologies and their impacts on how their data are collected, managed, and ultimately presented. Anthropological Data in the Digital Age compiles a range of academics in anthropology and the information sciences, archivists, and librarians to offer in-depth discussions of the issues raised by digital scholarship. The volume covers the technical aspects of data management—retrieval, metadata, dissemination, presentation, and preservation—while at once engaging with case studies written by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists returning from the field to grapple with the implications of producing data digitally. Concluding with thoughts on the new considerations and ethics of digital data, Anthropological Data in the Digital Age is a multi-faceted meditation on anthropological practice in a technologically mediated world.

Technology, Anthropology, and Dimensions of Responsibility

Technology, Anthropology, and Dimensions of Responsibility PDF Author: Birgit Beck
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3476048969
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
“With great power comes great responsibility.” In today’s world, with our growing technological power and the knowledge about its impact, we are considered to be responsible for many instances that not long ago would have been deemed a matter of fate. At the same time, the looming options of, e.g., genome editing or neuroprosthetics, threaten traditional notions of responsibility if no longer the person but the technology involved is deemed to be responsible for a specific behaviour. The growing ethical debate on the expansion of human responsibility, e.g. when it comes to human-machine-interaction, ambient intelligence, or reproductive technologies, thus intertwines with the challenge to formulate an appropriate understanding of the concept of personal responsibility and our respective anthropological self-understanding in today’s technological world. The volume brings together both perspectives and aims at illuminating crucial dimensions of responsibility in light of technological innovation and our self-understanding as responsible beings.

Being Human in a Technological Age

Being Human in a Technological Age PDF Author: Steven C. van den Heuvel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789042941816
Category : Technology
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
'What does it mean to be human?' This age-old question has gained new urgency in the light of current technological developments. This volume addresses these developments, as well as the impact they have on human self-understanding, particularly from the perspective of Christian theological anthropology. This volume consists of fourteen chapters, divided into four different parts. The first part explores the challenges that contemporary technology poses with regard to human self-understanding. In the second part, the conceptual assumptions of technological developments themselves are critically questioned. The third part offers theological perspectives on technological developments and assumptions. The fourth and last part of the book returns to the empirical realm, describing the ethical challenges that can be experienced living with complex technology.

Anthropological Perspectives on Technology

Anthropological Perspectives on Technology PDF Author: Michael B. Schiffer
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826323699
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
These fourteen original essays accept a dual premise: technology pervades and is embedded in all human activities. By taking that approach, studies of technology address two questions central in anthropological and archaeological research today-accounting for variability and change. These diverse yet interrelated chapters show that to understand human lives, researchers must deal with the material world that all peoples create and inhabit. Therefore an anthropology of technology is not a separate, discrete inquiry; instead, it is a way to connect how people make and use things to any activity studied, ranging from religion, to enculturation, to communication, to art. Each contributor discusses theories and methods and also offers a substantial case study. These detailed inquiries span human societies from the Paleolithic to the computer age. By moving beyond the usual approach of examining ancient technologies, particularly chipped stone and low-fired ceramics, this volume probes for the construction of meaning in the material world across millennia. The authors of these essays find technology to be an inclusive and flexible topic that merges with studies of everything else in human activity. "A provocative and powerful discussion of the role of technology in human cultures. At a time when archaeology has become less focused on theory, and archaeology and social anthropology seem to fracture farther and farther apart, the book is a breath of fresh air."--Professor John Douglas, University of Montana

Media Anthropology for the Digital Age

Media Anthropology for the Digital Age PDF Author: Anna Cristina Pertierra
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9781509508464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The field of anthropology took a long time to discover the significance of media in modern culture. In this important new book, Anna Pertierra tells the story of how a field - once firmly associated with the study of esoteric cultures - became a central part of the global study of media and communication. She recounts the rise of anthropological studies of media, the discovery of digital cultures, and the embrace of ethnographic methods by media scholars around the world. Bringing together longstanding debates in sociocultural anthropology with recent innovations in digital cultural research, this book explains how anthropology fits into the story and study of media in the contemporary world. It charts the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies in order to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place. Moreover, the book shows how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from a ground-level perspective and to understand the human experience of media in the digital age. Media Anthropology for the Digital Age will be of interest to students and scholars of media and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone wanting to understand the use of anthropology across wider cultural debates.

Outsider Within

Outsider Within PDF Author: Faye Venetia Harrison
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252074904
Category : Applied anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Envisioning new directions for an inclusive anthropology

Cultural Anthropology A Toolkit for a Global Age

Cultural Anthropology A Toolkit for a Global Age PDF Author: Kenneth J Guest
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393265005
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 18

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Book Description
The Second Edition of Ken Guest's Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age covers the concepts that drive cultural anthropology by showing that now, more than ever, global forces affect local culture and the tools of cultural anthropology are relevant to living in a globalizing world.

The Technologisation of the Social

The Technologisation of the Social PDF Author: Paul O'Connor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000517985
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life.

Man in the Age of Technology

Man in the Age of Technology PDF Author: Arnold Gehlen
Publisher: New York : Columbia University Press
ISBN:
Category : Social history
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description