Culture and Technology

A Primer

By: J. Macgregor Wise, Jennifer Daryl Slack

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Paperback | 17 December 2014 | Edition Number 4

At a Glance

Paperback
269 Pages

Edition Type
Revised

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.91

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From mobile phones to surveillance cameras, from fracking to genetically modified food, we live in an age of intense debate about technology's place in our culture. Culture and Technology is an essential guide to that debate and its fascinating history. It is a primer for beginners and an invaluable resource for those deeply committed to understanding the new digital culture. The award-winning first edition (2005) has been comprehensively updated to incorporate new technologies and contemporary theories about them. Slack and Wise untangle and expose cultural assumptions that underlie our thinking about technology, stories so deeply held we often don't recognize their influence. The book considers the perceived inevitability of technological progress, the role of control and convenience, and the very sense of what technology is. It considers resistance to dominant stories by Luddites, the Unabomber, and the alternative technology movement. Most important, it builds an alternative, cultural studies approach for engaging technological culture, one that considers politics, economics, space, time, identity, and change. After all, what we think and what we do make a difference.

Industry Reviews

<> (Gregory Seigworth, Millersville University)
<<'Culture and Technology: A Primer' offers a major theoretical synthesis in the guise of an easy-to-use textbook. If you want to understand why culture matters for the study of technology and what a cultural studies approach brings to our understandings of technology, this book is essential. In clear and thoughtful prose, Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise begin with a critique of the standard assumptions about technology and culture and their dangerous political and environmental consequences. They then synthesize some of the key insights from cultural studies with work in actor-network theory, science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology. Culture and Technology offers a program for studying technologies as at once artifacts of human action, actors in their own right, and part of larger forces in the world. I assigned the first edition to undergraduates, placed it on PhD students' comprehensive examination lists, and recommended it to senior science and technology studies scholars who wanted to understand what cultural studies can contribute to their work. The second edition includes a host of nice updates that make it an even better teaching resource. It will continue to be of great use for many years in all of the fields that it touches.>> (Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction)

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