CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ferris Wheel, Airbag, Cultural Determinism
Jan 15th
Technological/cultural determinism
● Pacey - Technology and its uses
○ Relation to technology differs with age
○ Is technology culturally neutral?
○ Look at the web of human activities surrounding the machine
■ Its uses/image
■ What supplies its needs
■ What skills users need
■ What needs to be built to support it
● Cars → Materials to build it, gasoline, stoplights, roads
○ If it’s to be of any use, it [technology] must fit into a pattern of activity
which belongs to a particular lifestyle and set of values
● Hand powered ferris wheel in Bombay
○ Ferris wheel powered by hand is better in this case because its
cheaper than the technology involved in an electric ferris wheel
■ Cheaper than the technology for the ferris wheel/electricity
○ Cost efficient
■ Depends on the worker wage in the country
● Hovding - airbag for cyclists
○ Can’t use it in North America due to its function and its materials
■ Useful but cannot use in different cultures
● Social/organizational change
○ Gathering workers in one place and watching over them
○ Something else changed -- People would leave home to work at a
place owned by someone else
■ People learned to organize their lives not by the rising of the
sun, but the organizational structure in which people would all
work a little piece of a whole and get paid
■ Organizational change is just as important as the technological
change of the steam engine
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