SOCI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Smallpox Vaccine, Thomas Friedman, World Wide Web
19 Dec 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Lecture 23: technology + society: technology : solutions to problems you may not have thought of unless you"d seen someone else doing it. Knowledge, technique & good ideas often seen as restricting us: technology mediates the way we live/interact in society. Transportation (i. e. broadening of markets - trade, world is incredibly mobile - migration) Medicine (i. e. living longer - personal health, reproduction attitude, demographic change) Automation (i. e increased leisure - washing machine, economic production) Technological change is exogenous something happens to society that changes the way we act. The way people actually do science/technology (make inventions) is a social process. By knowing social institutions & norms skew scienti c knowledge. Hinder good science (heliocentric astronomy, stem cells) By knowing how scienti c knowledge is itself social. Kuhn: paradigms + structure of scienti c revolutions. Latour: creation of a scienti c fact - looked at invention of smallpox vaccine: technology of communication is hugely impactful on society.
