Critique of Technology (original) (raw)
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Philosophy of Technology for Children and Youth II
Proceedings of the 6th International STEM in Education Conference (STEM 2021), 2021
This unique contribution to philosophy of technology for children and youth (PT4CY) draws on a subset of data from interviews within the scope of a summer camp (n=29). The key interview question is "what is technology?" We note that participants commonly characterize technology as popular devices but they also offer a range of unusual and contemplative responses. This paper focuses on these more unusual responses. The first section provides brief histories of philosophy in the schools and philosophy for children (P4C). The second section gives an overview of PT4CY and presents and analyzes qualitative data through conversational analysis. The paper concludes with recommendations for STEM educators and researchers by stressing the urgency of diversifying questions for PT4CY.
Answering Critics of Media and Technology in Education
1998
Abstract: This paper provides a response to serious critics of media and technology in education. It concludes:(1) media and technology are best used as cognitive tools to learn rather than as surrogate teachers;(2) media and technology are only vehicles for the content and pedagogy that educators design into them; and (3) future efforts to integrate media and technology into education must be guided by stronger research and evaluation. Following an introduction that summarizes federal government support for media and technology in ...
2021
The twenty-first century can be described as a challenging time to become a media and technologically literate. Insufficient information has the effect of ruining lives, and we all have a responsibility to fight it where we see it. Research has mostly concentrated on the “bright side” of media and technology, aiming to understand and support in leveraging the multiple possibilities afforded of its usage. As the main channel of communication for a world is an inseparable duo of media and technology, it also has its dark side. The current worldwide misinformation and surrounding “information glut” (Postman, 1995), and waves of cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse demonstrated the need for a new approach to this problem. In The Dark Side of Media and Technology: A 21st Century Guide To Media and Technological Literacy, editor Edward Downs bring together contributors to explore the dark side that exists in media and technology and sheds some light on the dimmer matters of human interaction with media and technology. The forty-six authors develop an understanding of four primary outcomes of the human relationship to media and technology in 25 interesting, highly readable chapters. Each chapter introduces the reader with a meticulously developed theoretical background and latest research findings, presented by a remarkable group of multi-disciplinary experts and researchers. Their work is the proof of the correctness of sentence, that “media and technology can do both great and horrible things for people” (p. 2).
Technology and Critical Cultural Understanding
Open Journal of Philosophy, 2016
In our everyday lives, we come into contact with a series of technological objects and we employ technology in a number of ways. Usually, the “relation” we develop with these objects works, on a first level, for our benefit. On the other hand, we actually know little about the technologies we use in order to accomplish various activities. Technologies have neither been developed, nor do they exist independently, even though we tend to perceive them as natural objects in themselves. Perhaps they are as much defined by causal laws, which are relevant to their “behavior” as specific artifacts, as they obtain ad hoc characteristics through our significations, which already belong to a specific social system. This ignorance of common sense often leads to the exclusion of a number of topics that are intertwined with the technological phenomenon from the everyday agenda of political debate. Moreover, the errors that stem from our unsophisticated or even unconscious attitude towards these artifacts have important consequences on various areas, including “development” and “work”, education, the environment, and human communication itself. This paper will try to present elements of a critical theory of technology in order to illustrate the need to link the technological phenomenon with everyday political practice.
Editorial: Technology and Culture
Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006
Judging from the outpouring of proposals and submissions we received in response to our original call for papers, there is enough critical thought on the theme of technology and culture to occupy whatever space can be made available to it. We filled the space we had with contributors who enlivened the difficult questions (albeit in words, now on pages): What does such critical space look like, and how does it emerge in relation to the spaces it critiques? In the changing force-fields of the university and the knowledge-based economy, these are particularly important questions. Like other production contexts shaped by the rapidly escalating scale of their operations and the changing agendas of their administrators, institutions of higher learning have re-dedicated their organizations, their budgets, their curricula and their material futures to the enhancement of digitally mediated knowledge processing. Like farms, offices, retail organizations and medical institutions, universities offer generous resources for those seeking to develop technological solutions to institutional objectives that are posed in such a way that no other solutions can be imagined. This milieu challenges us to think simultaneously in, through, around, and outside the socio-technical environment within which the technologies of culture multiply upon the world. In this issue, authors have taken a range of critical paths, offering pointed reflections on various sites in which the technologically mediated imagination is put to work.