Thinking about Technology

Thinking about Technology PDF Author: Joseph C. Pitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description

Thinking about Technology

Thinking about Technology PDF Author: Joseph C. Pitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description


Thinking Through Technology

Thinking Through Technology PDF Author: Carl Mitcham
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226531988
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This introduction to the philosophy of technology discusses its sources and uses. Tracing the changing meaning of "technology" from ancient times to the modern day, it identifies two important traditions of critical analysis of technology: the engineering approach and the humanities approach.

Smarter Than You Think

Smarter Than You Think PDF Author: Clive Thompson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101638710
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.

What Tech Calls Thinking

What Tech Calls Thinking PDF Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Human-Built World

Human-Built World PDF Author: Thomas P. Hughes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022612066X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

Persuasive Technology

Persuasive Technology PDF Author: B.J. Fogg
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080479944
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Can computers change what you think and do? Can they motivate you to stop smoking, persuade you to buy insurance, or convince you to join the Army? "Yes, they can," says Dr. B.J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. Fogg has coined the phrase "Captology"(an acronym for computers as persuasive technologies) to capture the domain of research, design, and applications of persuasive computers.In this thought-provoking book, based on nine years of research in captology, Dr. Fogg reveals how Web sites, software applications, and mobile devices can be used to change people's attitudes and behavior. Technology designers, marketers, researchers, consumers—anyone who wants to leverage or simply understand the persuasive power of interactive technology—will appreciate the compelling insights and illuminating examples found inside. Persuasive technology can be controversial—and it should be. Who will wield this power of digital influence? And to what end? Now is the time to survey the issues and explore the principles of persuasive technology, and B.J. Fogg has written this book to be your guide.* Filled with key term definitions in persuasive computing*Provides frameworks for understanding this domain*Describes real examples of persuasive technologies

Thinking about Technology

Thinking about Technology PDF Author: Gil Germain
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498549543
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
The world we make reflects the way reality is perceived, and today the world is perceived primarily in technological terms. So argues Gil Germain in Thinking About Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality. Given the connection between perception and action, or thinking and doing, Germain first highlights the central features of technological worldview to better understand the contemporary drive to master the conditions of human existence. He then boldly proposes that the technological worldview seriously misreads the nature of the world it seeks mastery over, and shows how this misinterpretation invariably leads to the technologically-related challenges currently vexing the contemporary social order, from the drift toward a posthuman future to the anti-globalization backlash. Germain closes Thinking About Technology by articulating an alternative worldview to the technological perspective and illustrating how this re-reading of reality might help us inhabit the technological landscape in ways better attuned to the human condition.

Not So Fast

Not So Fast PDF Author: Doug Hill
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082035029X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
There's a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, "How's the water?" The younger fish are puzzled. "What's water?" they ask. Many of us today might ask a similar question: What's technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we're so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us. Usually when we hear the word "technology," we automatically think of digital de- vices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shop- ping, and social networks may seem, however, they t into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We're not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it's right around the corner. What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, inter- woven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?

Thinking through Technology

Thinking through Technology PDF Author: Carl Mitcham
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825396
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
What does it mean to think about technology philosophically? Why try? These are the issues that Carl Mitcham addresses in this work, a comprehensive, critical introduction to the philosophy of technology and a discussion of its sources and uses. Tracing the changing meaning of "technology" from ancient times to our own, Mitcham identifies the most important traditions of critical analysis of technology: the engineering approach, which assumes the centrality of technology in human life; and the humanities approach, which is concerned with its moral and cultural boundaries. Mitcham bridges these two traditions through an analysis of discussions of engineering design, of the distinction between tools and machines, and of engineering science itself. He looks at technology as it is experienced in everyday life—as material objects (from kitchenware to computers), as knowledge ( including recipes, rules, theories, and intuitive "know-how"), as activity (design, construction, and use), and as volition (knowing how to use technology and understanding its consequences). By elucidating these multiple aspects, Mitcham establishes criteria for a more comprehensive analysis of ethical issues in applications of science and technology. This book will guide anyone wanting to reflect on technology and its moral implications.

Strategic Thinking for Information Technology

Strategic Thinking for Information Technology PDF Author: Bernard H. Boar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The information age; Strategy; Strategic ideas; Strategic configurations of power; Breeder strategy; IT organization design for the information age; Anatomy of an IT guru; Epilogue: the way of the IT warrior; Appendixes; Index.