ICT 300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Invisible Hand, Market Economy, Social Change
13 Sep 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Robots and automated machines put human laborers out of work. The typewriter brought women into the workplace. The birth control pill produced the sexual revolution. The internet created a more democratic society. Ideas of progress: technology used for social aims. Technologies conceptualized as an external agent that acts upon and changes society (baym) Social change is driven by goals of rationality and efficiency. These goals are achieved through the development of new technologies. This view of technological determinism is often associated with discussions of free market economics and capitalism. It looks scientific because it offers a single cause with a single effect. Advertisers , businesses, and others gain by describing technology in this way. Implies suspension of ethical judgment or social control. People may be treated as means to an end. Guns in japan (symbolic value of weapons) Mennonites and amish (valuing sustainability of community) Technological development follows a natural logic, which is beyond cultural or political influence.
