Pleasure, Power and Technology

Pleasure, Power and Technology PDF Author: Sally Hacker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351995928
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
How are the pleasures of making things work turned into processes of domination? Are there links between gender and military institutions? Does eroticism have something to do with engineering? In this book, first published in 1989, Sally Hacker explores the answers to these and other provocative questions about our attitudes toward work and leisure. Drawing from her broad experience as a sociologist, feminist and student of engineering, Hacker helps us to understand the impact of technology on our society and how feminist principles can be used to make work life more egalitarian and more humane. In the first part of the book, the author examines various examples of the masculinization of power, ranging from military institutions to the mechanisation of farm labour, computer technology and affirmative action. In the second part, Hacker presents the results of her research on Mondragon, the world’s largest cooperative workplace, located in Spain. Hacker reaches surprising conclusions about gender and technology at Mondragon, where, in spite of the community’s egalitarian philosophy, gender inequality was as pervasive as in capitalist and socialist systems.

Pleasure, Power and Technology

Pleasure, Power and Technology PDF Author: Sally Hacker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351995928
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
How are the pleasures of making things work turned into processes of domination? Are there links between gender and military institutions? Does eroticism have something to do with engineering? In this book, first published in 1989, Sally Hacker explores the answers to these and other provocative questions about our attitudes toward work and leisure. Drawing from her broad experience as a sociologist, feminist and student of engineering, Hacker helps us to understand the impact of technology on our society and how feminist principles can be used to make work life more egalitarian and more humane. In the first part of the book, the author examines various examples of the masculinization of power, ranging from military institutions to the mechanisation of farm labour, computer technology and affirmative action. In the second part, Hacker presents the results of her research on Mondragon, the world’s largest cooperative workplace, located in Spain. Hacker reaches surprising conclusions about gender and technology at Mondragon, where, in spite of the community’s egalitarian philosophy, gender inequality was as pervasive as in capitalist and socialist systems.

Power Button

Power Button PDF Author: Rachel Plotnick
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262347512
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and “like” something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, when “technologies of the hand” proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), Plotnick describes the ways that button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control. Emphasizing the doubly digital nature of button pushing—as an act of the finger and a binary activity (on/off, up/down)—Plotnick suggests that the tenets of precomputational digital command anticipate contemporary ideas of computer users. Plotnick discusses the uses of early push buttons to call servants, and the growing tensions between those who work with their hands and those who command with their fingers; automation as “automagic,” enabling command at a distance; instant gratification, and the victory of light over darkness; and early twentieth-century imaginings of a future push-button culture. Push buttons, Plotnick tells us, have demonstrated remarkable staying power, despite efforts to cast button pushers as lazy, privileged, and even dangerous.

Camming

Camming PDF Author: Angela Jones
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479874876
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Winner, Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2021 Sexualities Section Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association The first inside look at how sex workers use webcams to make a living The erotic webcam industry, also known as “camming,” is a thriving global business. Angela Jones takes readers inside this multi-billion dollar industry, revealing how its workers experience intimacy, community, empowerment—and, as she compellingly argues, pleasure. Drawing on in-depth interviews, survey data, web analytics, and more, Jones highlights not only the dangers, but also the rewards, of working in one of the most taboo corners of the Internet. She provides an inside look at the public and private shows between cam models and their customers, from exotic dancing and pornographic videos, to masturbation shows and erotic chatrooms. A fascinating, much-needed glimpse into the lives of cam models, Camming takes us behind the webcam lens to experience the power of erotic labor in the twenty-first century.

Power, Pleasure, and Profit

Power, Pleasure, and Profit PDF Author: David Wootton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989902
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

Play Anything

Play Anything PDF Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096506
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds -- forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Soccer wouldn't be soccer if it wasn't composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal; Tetris wouldn't be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it's the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances- like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can "play anything" by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears. Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today's chaotic world can only be tamed-and enjoyed-when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.

Gender Issues in Learning and Working with Information Technology: Social Constructs and Cultural Contexts

Gender Issues in Learning and Working with Information Technology: Social Constructs and Cultural Contexts PDF Author: Booth, Shirley
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1615208143
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
"This book deals with diffe four features of the burgeoning knowledge society: gender, equity, learning, and information technology with the focus on gender - not in the taken-for-granted biological sense of sex but in the socially constituted sense of it"--Provided by publisher.

Gender and Technology at Work

Gender and Technology at Work PDF Author: Ellen Balka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009243705
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This book traces the gendering of women's work and technology from its historical roots in factories, offices, IT companies, and hospitals to contemporary workplaces including platform- and AI-based work. It adopts a feminist/intersectional perspective on design with a focus on norm-critical, social justice-oriented, and decolonizing approaches.

Reader's Guide to the History of Science

Reader's Guide to the History of Science PDF Author: Arne Hessenbruch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134263015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 986

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Book Description
The Reader's Guide to the History of Science looks at the literature of science in some 550 entries on individuals (Einstein), institutions and disciplines (Mathematics), general themes (Romantic Science) and central concepts (Paradigm and Fact). The history of science is construed widely to include the history of medicine and technology as is reflected in the range of disciplines from which the international team of 200 contributors are drawn.

The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies

The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies PDF Author: Robin Mansell
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online
ISBN: 0199266239
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
The production and consumption of Information and Communication Technologies (or ICTs) have become embedded within our societies. The influence and implications of this have an impact at a macro level, in the way our governments, economies, and businesses operate, and in our everyday lives. This handbook is about the many challenges presented by ICTs. It sets out an intellectual agenda that examines the implications of ICTs for individuals, organizations, democracy, and the economy. Explicity interdisciplinary, and combining empirical research with theoretical work, it is organised around four themes covering the knowledge economy; organizational dynamics, strategy, and design; governance and democracy; and culture, community and new media literacies. It provides a comprehensive resource for those working in the social sciences, and in the physical sciences and engineering fields, with leading contemporary research informed principally by the disciplines of anthropology, economics, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

Routledge Library Editions: Women and Business

Routledge Library Editions: Women and Business PDF Author: Various
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351983954
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 3998

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Book Description
This 15-volume set of previously out-of-print tiles examines many aspects of women and business. Encompassing such as areas as women’s access to managerial positions, positions within trade unions, inequality, family life, role in family businesses and entrepreneurship, it is a remarkable collection and a vital business reference source.