Culture and Technology: A Primer / Edition 3

by Jennifer Daryl Slack, J. Macgregor Wise

Overview

From genetically modified food to weapons of mass destruction, we live in an age of intense debate about technology’s place in our culture. While the technologies have changed, these debates go back hundreds of years, and their assumptions have become deeply entrenched in our culture.
Culture and Technology is an essential guide to the fascinating history of these debates, and offers new perspectives that give readers the tools they need to make informed decisions about the role of technology in our lives. In clear and compelling language, Slack and Wise untangle and expose the 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 advance and our myths about progress. It also looks at sources of resistance to these stories from the Luddites of the 19th century to the Unabomber in our own time. Slack and Wise help readers sift through the confusions about culture and technology that arise in their own everyday lives.
This book is a must read for anyone who cares about the place of technology in our lives. It is a primer for beginners, and an invaluable resource for those who have pondered these issues before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820450070
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	06/01/2007
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

The Authors: Jennifer Daryl Slack is Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University. She is the author of Communication Technologies and Society (1984) and editor of The Ideology of the Information Age (with Fred Fejes, 1987), Thinking Geometrically (by John Waisanen, Peter Lang, 2002), and Animations (of Deleuze and Guattari) (Peter Lang, 2003).
J. Macgregor Wise is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Exploring Technology and Social Space (1997).

Table of Contents

Contents: Culture and Technology: The Received View – Representative Responses to the Received View – Cultural Studies on Technological Culture.

Editorial Reviews

«With its disarmingly modest tone – always attentive to the needs of the theoretically uninitiated, always ready with contemporary and captivating examples, always extending a hand to readers at every stage to join up as fellow travelers, Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise have written ‘a primer’ of the best sort. Their book is an open invitation to begin (or, for the initiated, to begin again with fresh eyes) an expertly mapped trek across a set of trajectories that reveals the twists and turns of the animating discourses knotted at the intersection of culture and technology. But more than this, Slack and Wise deftly show how knowledge gained can become knowledge for engaging – from background primer to timely intervention. The task of turning its readers into practical social actors in the everyday is truly this text’s great accomplishment.» (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)

From the Publisher