Media, Information and Technoculture 2500A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter W.1: Langdon Winner, The Roots, Ruling Class

• School: Western University
• Department: Media, Information and Technoculture
• Course: Media, Information and Technoculture 2500A/B
• Professor: Warren Steele

Document Summary

Week 1 readings: langdon winner do artifacts have politics? . Notion that technical thins have political qualities. Machines, structure, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Biggest and best that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom and social justice. Certain technologies in themselves have political properties: what matters is not the technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. Technology developed as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then unmediated holds society to fit its patterns. The social determination of technology essentially no different from the social determination of say, welfare policy or taxation: bc things don"t matter at all, just the social origins. Standard models of social science only go so dar in accounting for what is most interesting and troublesome in the subject.