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Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical theory has already marked that technology often threatens civil liberties, personal autonomy, and rights. Heidegger, later Marcuse, emphasized how technology is not value-free in its own revealing power of the surrounding environment, external and inner nature. Throughout this paper, I explore how the aesthetic approach engages with critical theory and contributes to the sociology of media and communication. For this, I will theoretically survey the terms of sociality under the forces of immediate communication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the compression of time and space that Baudrillard and Virilio once problematized through the lens of critical technology theory to adapt it to media and communication studies. I contend that techno-aesthetics that converge with Rancière's dissensus can provide practical suggestions on an updated vocation of critical sociology. This article discusses the potential of aesthetic and social criticism of media for democratizing technology that Feenberg inserted. It is urgent to acknowledge the changing spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination and limits of sociality and action to determine the next steps for achieving a commons-based society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 contact tracing app was announced to the British public on 12th April 2020. The UK government endorsed the app as a public health intervention that would improve public health, protect the NHS and 'save lives'. On 5th May 2020 the technology was released for trial on the Isle of Wight. However, the trial was halted in June 2020, reportedly due to technological issues. The app was later remodelled and launched to the public in September 2020. The rapid development, trial and discontinuation of the app over a short period of a few months meant that the mobilisation and effect of the discourses associated with the app could be traced relatively easily. In this paper we aimed to explore how these discourses were constructed in the media, and their effect on actors – in particular, those who developed and those who trialled the app. Promissory discourses were prevalent, the trajectory of which aligned with theories developed in the sociology of expectations. We describe this trajectory, and then interpret its implications in terms of infectious disease public health practices and responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perspicuous representation, Wittgenstein offers, is not another methodology, but it consists in seeing the connections. The Wittgensteinian perspicuous representation is therapeutic. The method he suggests for philosophy is the same method he suggests for social sciences. In both of these cases, he tries to get us to see the confusions we become entangled in when philosophizing and theorizing. In both of these disciplines he warns us not to advance explanatory, metaphysical theories. In this paper, I connect this concern with Wittgenstein's critique of Frazer. In criticizing Frazer, Wittgenstein adopts the important part of Spengler's view. Nonetheless, there are differences between Wittgenstein's views and those of Spengler; this paper aims to show similarities as well as these differences. The first part of the paper briefly summarizes Frazer's views. The second part focuses on Wittgenstein's critique of Frazer concerning science and technology. The third part gives an account of his critique regarding method of social sciences and philosophy. The last part concentrates on Wittgenstein's critique of Frazer pertaining to the tolerance towards alternative forms of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much debate has taken place in science and technology studies (S&TS) regarding how to speak about the capacities of technology. Alternative approaches are bound up with questions over the merits of realist and relativist accounts of technology and their potential for analytical insight and practical engagement. This paper advances a basis for examining the link between politics and artefacts, one that draws on but reconfigures the work of post-essentialist authors. This is done by moving away from attempts to detail the social basis of technology to consider instead where the ambiguities associated with technology are resolved. These issues are examined through the case of a (re-)emerging class of devices called 'non-lethal' weapons and, in particular, the chemical incapacitant spray used by British police forces. In doing so, this paper reframes debates in technology studies over how far it is possible and desirable to pursue relativist lines of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001, the US National Science Foundation inaugurated the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program with the primary objective of increasing the participation and advancement of women at American Universities in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Although ADVANCE has been received very well, its effects have been uneven among institutions receiving the ADVANCE grant. In this paper, we reflect on the NSF’s goals for ADVANCE and initiatives ADVANCE schools undertake to increase gender equity in the context of gender organizations theory. Specifically, we comment on tensions that emerged through our own research concerning the relationship between feminist objectives of equity and justice and the nature of the ADVANCE program and transformational initiatives. We conclude by raising the perennial feminist question: ‘Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The priority dispute between Raymond Damadian and Paul Lauterbur over the ‘invention’ of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has attracted the attention of social and natural scientists for more than 30 years. In this paper, I have used this priority dispute to analyze the complex socio-epistemic processes through which a claim for an invention is made and strengthened. I argue that a tension exists because techno-scientific practices are embedded within a particular disciplinary regime of authorship: even though techno-scientific practices occur through distributed cognition and are contingent upon particular socio-epistemic contexts, a claim for an invention requires assigning authorship to a particular person, company, or institution in order to clearly define the origin and the novelty of that particular techno-scientific event. Nevertheless, the outcomes of socio-epistemic practices for making and strengthening priority claims are shifting, open-ended, and contingent upon particular socio-epistemic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this paper we investigate the intricacies of an admirable water pumping device - the Zimbabwe Bush Pump 'B' type - so as to find out what makes it an 'appropriate technology'. This turns out to be what we call the 'fluidity' of the pump (of its boundaries, or of its working order, and of its maker). We find that in travelling to intractable places, an object that isn't too rigorously bounded, that doesn't impose itself but tries to serve, that is adaptable, flexible and responsive - in short, a fluid object - may well prove to be stronger than one which is firm. By analyzing the success and failure of this device, its agency and the way in which it shapes new configurations in the Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape, we partake in the current move in science and technology studies to transform what it means to be an actor. And by mobilizing the term love for articulating our relation to the Bush Pump, we try to contribute to shaping novel ways of 'doing' normativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful testing depends upon projecting from a test situation to the performance of a technology under working conditions. Some have argued that projection is made possible primarily through a collective agreement that the test circumstances and working conditions are similar in crucial ways. This paper argues that projection is better understood in many cases as a set of local practices through which testing produces change in a wider context of technology use. In the earthquake-engineering laboratory described here, this connection depends upon the circulation of skilled people, material objects and symbolic representations across distinct work settings, in such a way as to construct a continuous 'chain of practices' between the laboratory and the worlds of construction, academia and design engineering. This analysis highlights the importance of the division of labour in shaping technical practice both inside and outside the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]