Democracy and Technology

Democracy and Technology PDF Author: Richard Sclove
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9780898628616
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Intended for anyone interested in democracy and public policy, social justice and empowerment, political economy and business or the social consequences of technology and architecture.

Democracy and Technology

Democracy and Technology PDF Author: Richard Sclove
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9780898628616
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Intended for anyone interested in democracy and public policy, social justice and empowerment, political economy and business or the social consequences of technology and architecture.

Technology, Modernity, and Democracy

Technology, Modernity, and Democracy PDF Author: Eduardo Beira
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This important collection of essays by Andrew Feenberg presents his critical theory of technology, an innovative approach to philosophy and sociology of technology based on a synthesis of ideas drawn from STS and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. According to critical theory of technology, technologies are neither neutral nor deterministic, but are encoded with specific socio-economic values and interests. Feenberg explores how they can be developed and adapted to more or less democratic values and institutions, and how their future is subject to social action, negotiation and reinterpretation. Technologies bring with them a particular "rationality," sets of rules and implied ways of behaving and thinking which, despite their profound influence on institutions, ideas and actions, can be transformed in a process of democratic rationalization. Feenberg argues that the emergence of human communication on the Internet and the environmental movement offer abundant examples of public interventions that have reshaped technologies originally designed for different purposes. This volume includes chapters on citizenship and critical theory of technology, philosophy of technology and modernity, and Heidegger and Marcuse, two of the most prominent philosophers of technology.

Technology in the Western Political Tradition

Technology in the Western Political Tradition PDF Author: Arthur M. Melzer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801480065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This well-integrated group of thirteen papers addresses the intriguing and perplexing issue of whether modern government can handle the problem of technology.

Strong Democracy

Strong Democracy PDF Author: Benjamin Barber
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520242333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
"One of the chosen few: an enduring contribution to democratic thought."—Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University

Everyday Technology

Everyday Technology PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922030
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa from London, wrote his now celebrated tract Hind Swaraj, laying out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life, but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of the everyday. Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate “big” technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood. Arnold’s fascinating book offers new perspectives on the globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and themselves.

Between Reason and Experience

Between Reason and Experience PDF Author: Andrew Feenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262265656
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience. The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.

Technosystem

Technosystem PDF Author: Andrew Feenberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971787
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
We live in a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by technically trained personnel—a unique social organization that largely determines our way of life. Andrew Feenberg’s theory of social rationality represents both the threats of technocratic modernity and the potential for democratic change.

Future Politics

Future Politics PDF Author: Jamie Susskind
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192559494
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
Politics in the Twentieth Century was dominated by a single question: how much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society? Now the debate is different: to what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems - and on what terms? Digital technologies - from artificial intelligence to blockchain, from robotics to virtual reality - are transforming the way we live together. Those who control the most powerful technologies are increasingly able to control the rest of us. As time goes on, these powerful entities - usually big tech firms and the state - will set the limits of our liberty, decreeing what may be done and what is forbidden. Their algorithms will determine vital questions of social justice. In their hands, democracy will flourish or decay. A landmark work of political theory, Future Politics challenges readers to rethink what it means to be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, and what it means for a political system to be just or democratic. In a time of rapid and relentless changes, it is a book about how we can - and must - regain control. Winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.

Questioning Technology

Questioning Technology PDF Author: Andrew Feenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134737971
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In this extraordinary introduction to the study of the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg argues that techonological design is central to the social and political structure of modern societies. Environmentalism, information technology, and medical advances testify to technology's crucial importance. In his lucid and engaging style, Feenberg shows that technology is the medium of daily life. Every major technical changes reverberates at countless levels: economic, political, and cultural. If we continue to see the social and technical domains as being seperate, then we are essentially denying an integral part of our existence, and our place in a democratic society. Questioning Tecchnology convinces us that it is vital that we learn more about technology the better to live with it and to manage it.

Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization

Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization PDF Author: Ralph Schroeder
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349268364
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
These essays bring Weber's sociology to bear on the current transformation of the political landscape. After the collapse of communism, many states are faced with the challenges of democratization: they need to establish their legitimacy in an uncertain economic climate and within a new geopolitical order. The essays in this volume develop Weberian concepts and apply his comparative-historical method to deepen our understanding of these problems. They cover a wide range of examples, from the United States to Western and Eastern Europe, and from Russia and Japan to the Islamic states.