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Technology permeates our lives having significant effects on how we communicate, live, work and play. Information Communication Technologies have allowed individuals to stay connected to family, friends and work colleagues and has brought about broad societal benefits. But, technologies are not limited to having positive impacts and consequences; they have led to widespread job loss in particular industries with consequential negative social costs, others to the development of globally destructive weaponry and increased environmental harm. This paper has three aims. Overall, it is a call for stronger sociological (re)engagement in crucial digital technology debates and its significant and frequently disruptive nature upon society. Thus, it begins with a review of key literature with respect to traditional technology development processes. A theory is presented on the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and how digital communications and the unrestrained ‘wild west culture of the Web 2.0 revolution’ have facilitated a state where fact and fiction wrestle for online attention and popularity. The paper concludes with a brief look at areas of particular concern with regards to contemporary technology development and a call for sociology to reposition itself centrally in debates about new digital technologies that are fundamentally changing societies, communities and lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gutenberg Galaxy, built on the printed word, is the space of existence of civilization, in the center of which stands the "typographic man". Marshall McLuhan describes in his famous book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) the paradigm of human existence in the print era. He also talks about the impact of technology on civilization, about the future of humanity, about the transition from the individual to the collective existence, on a "tribal base", in the "global village", and about the control exercised by Big Brother through electronic means. New technologies, especially information technology, make the transition of civilization and of the individual into the Digital Era and virtual universe. Based on McLuhan's model, we can now talk about: The "Googleberg" Galaxy and the Making of Digital Man. Technology generates a new paradigm of existence, communication, culture and knowledge. Its benefits are huge for the individual and for humanity. But so are its risks and dangers: the transfer of the existence from real to virtual, the transformation of the real human being into a virtual being, his or her depersonalization, despiritualization, and deculturalization, the superficial knowledge and mediocrization, the control and manipulation of all, massification and uniformization of individuals through the digital technology within the globalization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberty was once praiseworthy because it enabled a free choice for the good. Technology recasts the classical link between liberty and virtue by making human well-being depend on technological advance. Till recently, technology signified human mastery over nature. But now virtual reality offers itself as a substitute for nature. Unlike machines which hold us at a distance, it draws us in with images. It no longer shapes the soul indirectly through the effects of using machines, but involves the soul directly. The modern attempt to bracket the soul has brought it back virtually. The argument between fight and flight is at a standstill. Instead, the irony which many lament as a feature of postmodernity can provide a distance from the technologies which have made themselves necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article outlines the process that can lead from present or future technological promise to ready and palpable fighting advantage, seeing its management as an expression of the connection between the logic of politics and the grammar of the means of force. A historical illustration brings to mind some things worth thinking about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the phenomenon of identity in the age of technology, especially the one in the so-called virtual space, which is characheristic for a progress of digital technology. In this regard, the notion of identity is brought into direct connection with the „post human" society and its implications on the problem of freedom. On the other hand, freedom is considered at the new context of sociality and more intensive dialogue on European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between two theories is evaluated in this article looking for a methodology allowing assessing digital inclusion points (DIP) in Brazil with a critical vision towards mediation. The perception of confluence areas between Warschauer and Wygotsky -convergence of resources and mediationpointing at the possibility of dialogue with the intention of establishing a theoretical-- methodological line is highlighted. The significance of considering the junction of state-of-the-art technologies and knowledge in order to close the gap is shown. The analysis is critical and search for promoting debates on cognitive approach for digital inclusion. The cognitive approach of this perspective, no longer a purely quantitative side of these approaches, to join the convergence of the proposed resources. Thus, according to the theoretical apparatus presented in this article, the assessment should be carried out from the mediator and the mediated relationship, noting that there is some cognitive impairment in users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For all of its political drama, the health care debate appears consumed with bureaucratic minutiae quite distant from political philosophy. Yet in important respects that debate is intimately connected with the founding premises of the modern technological project of the mastery of nature for the relief of man's estate as envisioned by Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. This essay uses a recent discussion of the health care debate by bioethicist Daniel Callahan to raise some fundamental questions about the role of technology in our medical culture. It argues that modern health care is the Cartesian project come of age, and it uses Descartes' Discourse on Method to reflect on the possibility of a sensible politics of technology in our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While nature is often claimed to be a space of harmonized balance or an antidote to the chaos of the modern world, we need a more grounded assessment of nature as endlessly changing and much less predictable than we like to assume. In this essay, I explore Karen Traviss' provocative exploration of unbalanced nature and unbounded bodies in her wess'har series with the guidance of two ecocritics who reject the concept of balanced nature, Dana Phillips and Ursula Heise. Additionally, I turn to the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood for insights regarding Traviss' spurious yet rather standard vision of an unlimited technological panacea. Traviss' series portrays how the boundaries and limits that we perceive as solid are often much less so than we believe, yet she also reveals-inadvertently, it seems-how easily we blindly ignore other, more solid limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a defining aspect of technology is the role that it plays in extending human capabilities. The conception of extension defended here is first compared with some well known extension theories from the philosophy of technology and then developed both by considering extension as a form of 'enrolment' and by integrating this conception of extension within a more general, ontological, conception of material artefacts. By drawing attention to the 'extension' aspect of technology, however, the intention is not only to distinguish technology from other material artefacts, but also to attempt to contribute to understanding of the peculiar position technology occupies in modern societies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neither religion nor science is first of all a realm of pure ideas, even though religion-and-science discussions often assume that they are. I propose that a concept of embodied science is more adequate and that religion-and-science should center its attention on science as enabler for improving the world (SEIW). This idea of science is rooted in Jerome Ravetz's concept of industrialized science and Donna Haraway's technoscience. SEIW describes the sociocultural context of science in commercial, government, and university settings. The chief focus of religion-and-science consequently takes into account five basic issues: (1) the kind of world we want, (2) liberating science, (3) human action and ethics, (4) religion and the world's possibilities, and (5) recovering myth. An underlying presupposition of the discussion is that understanding the world always involves as well an understanding of our being-in-the-world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How one thinks about the relationship between individual autonomy (sometimes referred to as individual willpower or human agency) and technology can influence the way legal thinkers develop policy at the intersection of law and technology. Perspectives that fall toward the `machines control us' end of the spectrum may support more interventionist legal policies while those who identify more closely with the `we are in charge of machines' position may refuse to interfere with technological developments. The concept of soft determinism charts a middle-ground between these two positions and could assist in the formulation of a general theory of the relationship between law and technology. Soft determinism maintains that technological developments are embedded in social, political, economic and other processes, and serve to guide and, potentially, configure future actions and relationships with these technologies, their users, and their subjects: while past technology develops shape the present, individuals and groups can still exert control over these technological developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abraham Lincoln presented a lecture in 1858–1859 on the process of “Discoveries and Invention.” In this lecture he discusses man's desire to improve his condition and the use of technology to that end. The process of discovery and invention allows man to develop that technology and alleviate his state. Education, especially literacy, allows knowledge to be passed down through time, facilitating yet further improvement. Yet, Lincoln warns that human nature can also become raw material, as seen in the institution of slavery. In light of Lincoln's more commonly known natural rights argument against slavery, this warning about human nature takes on greater significance. Coupled with an address on agriculture from 1859, Lincoln's lecture on discovery and invention attempts to illustrate the liberating power of invention and education while reminding us of the limits posed by man's natural equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I use my own research experiences to address a critical intersection between technology and sociology. I suggest that thinking reflexively about technology might enhance both how sociologists do research and how they teach about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies Carey's contributions to the concept of technoculture and attempts to systematize his writings on communication, culture, and technology in order to craft a methodological strategy for the study of technoculture based on participant observation and contemporary ethnographic practices of representation. After introducing a definition of technoculture, we outline how technography—the study of technoculture in everyday life—builds upon two sensitizing metaphors: technoculture as ecology and as semiosis. The discussion of technography shows the potential of this research strategy for the study of the symbolic interaction among technics, technological practices, social agents, and the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that technology is no longer merely a tool for man's use but has become the environment in which man undergoes modifications. The author traces the role of technology from the Greeks to the present day. For the Greeks, Nature was governed by necessity and therefore unchangeable whereas in the Judeo-Christian tradition, nature was entrusted to man for him to dominate. Modern science studies the world in order to manipulate and dominate nature through the use of technology which has now become an end in itself, governing the solution of political problems and confronting us with problems beyond our competence to resolve. The ethical impact of technology has been to create a change from ‘acting’ which assumes responsibility for one's actions to ‘doing’ which is concerned only with the effective execution of a ‘job’ without concern for the wider consequences. It can no longer be argued that technology is good or bad according to the use we make of it since technology now makes use of us and thus transforms our ethics, social relationships and psychological being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the relationship between technology and institutions and asks whether technology itself is an institution. The argument is that social theorists need to attend better to materiality: the world of things and objects of which technical things form an important class. It criticizes the new institutionalism in sociology for its failure to sufficiently open up the black box of technology. Recent work in science and technology studies (S&TS) and in particular the sociology of technology is reviewed as another route into dealing with technology and materiality. The recent ideas in sociology of technology are exemplified with the author’s study of the development of the electronic music synthesizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of people are turning to transhumanism, which aims to promote and encourage human enhancement through the application of science and technology. They maintain that this is a good thing, and that we should encourage and work towards the attainment of a posthuman condition. Not ones to dwell on the future while passively waiting for it to happen, trashumanists engage in foresight, activist and promotional activities. Just as significantly, the day-to-day lifestyle choices of transhumanists reflect anticipated change. Transhumanism is in many respects a burgeoning lifestyle choice and cultural phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a two year empirical investigation of three- and four-year-old children's uses of technology at home, based on a survey of 346 families and 24 case studies. Using a socio-cultural approach, we discuss the range of technologies children encounter in the home, the different forms their learning takes, the roles of adults and other children and how family practices support this learning. Many parents believed that they did not teach children how to use technology. We discuss parents' beliefs that their children 'pick up' their competencies with technology and identify trial and error, copying and demonstration as typical modes of learning. Parents tend to consider that their children are mainly self-taught and underestimate their own role in supporting learning and the extent to which learning with technology is culturally transmitted within the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to understand the most significant characteristics of young people born in a context of both permanent technological change and its incorporation into daily life. It is important to consider the challenges that the university faces in adjusting to the potential of this generation. Also important to consider is the historical opportunity for Mexico to capitalize on the population boom of the next decades. [TRANSLATION]

The proposal of Arnold Gehlen has been categorized as "anthropobiology". The current article describes the continuity established by Gehlen between the biology of the human being and such specifically human dimensions as technology and culture. This continuity is revealed, from a negative point of view, in the biological precariousness of the human body; from a positive point of view, in the opening to the world via action. With his or her activity, the human being compensates for physical deficiency through the construction of the world in the format of technological artifacts, institutions and ethical systems. Finally, this article will critically examine the reach and limits of Gehlen's proposal, primarily concerning the unity of the human person, the understanding of action and the idea of an "achieved life". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the socio-technical framework for 4th Generation (4G) wireless communication networks. It states that current technologies of cooperation are considered as practical tools in solving the problems which beset the world today. However, they are also taken as forerunners of new forms of social and economic organization. It is also posed that the introduction of the Internet have made people to create things which were never thought to be capable of being introduced before. The eight categories of cooperative technologies are also discussed.

The significance of technology as a human creation is explored through the topic of touch. Touch is variously considered as the alignment of properties of the technological artifact with human sense, as the virtuosity of the user and producer, as an aesthetic, and finally as a participation in problems of value that exceed any one person’s capacity to grasp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the development of Iraq's technology as a redemption of British India's defeat during the First World War I. It examines the development of Iraq by the British India and argues that the modern notion of colonial development was a product of the expansion of the British empire into the Middle East through India during the First World War. He mentions that India's success transformed Iraq's transportation facilities through the Indian government's provision of technical experts, labor and materials for the ship, railways and harbor construction. He discusses that the idea of developing Iraq fulfilled certain military and cultural needs generated by the Great War and offered proof of the constructive powers of modern technology and the British empire.

The paper defends the undeniable thesis of technological progress but not the idea of an optimistic absolute progress, but limited and in context. Technological progress is conceived on two levels: (a) technical and (b) valuative. The first responds to internal rationality of technology, in this respect it is obvious that the technology (all time) improves and its advances. The second includes two aspects: the effects of technology in the environment and its contribution to social progress. On this second level, it is more difficult to determine the sense of direction of technological progress, since the technological progress is evaluative. The fundamental idea resides in that technological progress, in itself, doesn't lead to social or human progress necessarily, because the last not only depends on the technological variable, it intervenes another series of factors. This way, technological progress is a involves condition but not enough for social progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors explore how technology has helped erode society's conceptions of justice. Law, via juridification, has replaced the concept of justice with one of efficiency. The authors argue that this has been largely a result of the destruction of society's common story or vision and the introduction of the computer and the Internet as tools enabling technique to replace that story. They offer a perspective on how justice operated in traditional societies, using the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Finally, the authors ask what might be done to recover the best features of what has been lost and create a new common story to help guide society's conception of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the changing definitions of the term technology. It contends that technology was traditionally defined as the science of the practical arts. It asserts that the founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861 brought technology into more common usage in the U.S. It explains that the change from technology as the study of the practical arts, to technology as the artifacts and processes of industrial civilization was brought by the German discourse of Technik.

The focus of this paper is a reassessment of the apparent opposition between technology and human nature. Paleoanthropologists have argued that human evolution is closely connected to the use and development of tools. Tool use is also found among animals, but the human cognitive apparatus enables humans to use tools in unparalleled ways. From this, it is concluded that technology and culture are natural phenomena, and that humans are ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ or, theologically speaking, ‘created co-creators,’ naturally enabled to use technology as extensions of their bodies and minds and as an instrument to enhance the freedom of all of creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber's reply to Werner Sombart's lecture on technology and culture, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society held in Frankfurt in 1910, is discussed in terms of its conventional and improvised character as a distinctive mode of `sociological' speech. Emphasis is placed on the specific rhetorical circumstances that gave rise to these remarks, especially with regard to Weber's status as an authorized speaker at the meeting, and their formulation as a response to Marxist theories accepted or criticized by members of the audience. In characterizing the relationship between technology and culture specifically as a topic of sociological discourse, Weber's comments therefore constitute a speechact in their own right. They both conform to the protocols of `value-free' academic debate upheld by the Society and experiment with this new genre and forum of intellectual discussion. Weber's innovative aspirations are ultimately in tension with his efforts to routinize or even rationalize the scholarly vocation (Beruf) of sociology as both an inward calling and an institutionalized profession that can speak critically to the most pressing and relevant issues of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to establish that Lewis Mumford's historical and philosophical writings were heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. It is argued that Freudian ideas and concepts played a foundational role in the construction of Mumford's views on the nature and function of mind, culture and history, which in turn founded his views on the relationship between technology and society. Indeed, it is argued that a full understanding of Mumford's technological writings cannot be achieved until one has grasped their psychoanalytic influence. To this end, this article will reconstruct the psychological views of Lewis Mumford and indicate how they draw upon and modify Freudian theory. It will then be shown how Mumford's theory of the psyche interacts with Mumford's own concept of the idolum. This interaction, I will argue, considerably underpins Mumford's holistic views on the relationship between society and the individual and between the internal and external world and will require us to reconsider our understanding of Mumford's philosophy of technology, particularly with regard to his descriptions of monotechnics and biotechnics, the authoritarian and democratic technological forms. It will be argued that for Mumford the division in technics corresponds to a division in the human psyche, and indeed arises from it. Not only will an appreciation of Mumford's Freudian influence alter our understanding of Mumford's technological writings in general, but also in particular it can enable us better to comprehend the reasoning behind Mumford's recommended method of resistance to the modern power complex of the megamachine. Such a revised understanding of Mumford's philosophy also undercuts any attempts to characterize his position as being a technological determinist one. Rather, his philosophy of technology is better understood as a form of techno- logical voluntarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology and magic both represent the human will to power--to dominate nature and ultimately humans. In a technological civilization, magic imitates technology. Modern management often entails psychological techniques (the human relations approach) and organizational techniques (the scientific approach). The heart of the latter is statistical measurement and prediction of the future. This article examines the magical use of statistical measurement and prediction of the future. Magic here operates according to the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Because statistical information is perceived to be related to the success of an organization and is invariably collected in abundance, it is given credit for actual success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how to give technology the dignity equal to that of morality so that a relation would be established between humans and technology. By redefining the technical, which the author considers to be an adjective and not a substantive. It is pointless to want to define some entities and some situations as technical in opposition to others called scientific or moral, political or economic. Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being. As the author sees it, the relation of technology to morality is somewhat modified in connection to its mode of existence.

Might a rapprochement be desirable and possible between the more academic and the more activist wings of STS? What can each learn from the other? A promising trajectory for this purpose may be to reinterpret and extend research in the constructivist tradition, building on recent work that appears to constitute the beginnings of a reconstructivist scholarly tradition. Some of the necessary work would be explicitly prescriptive: given that technology and society are mutually and reciprocally constructing, how should technologies be constructed, which social groups deserve inclusion in which processes, and how should closure be reached? But other issues might be taken up by scholars motivated exclusively by curiosity, or by the intention of building a subfield: what factors slow or prevent the emergence of entire subfields of technoscientific endeavour, as arguably has occurred with 'green chemistry', 'alternative health', and alternatives to weaponry-oriented national defence? Our intention is not to prescribe, but to help catalyse a next round of friendly discussion in STS about these and related matters, encouraging greater reflexivity of the field as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on several perspectives on technological revolution. Potential of technology to complete or supplement human nature; Details on the justification of programs of genetically re-engineering species by liberal principles of equality and autonomy; Conservatives opinion on eugenics; Comments on the feasibility of artificial intelligence.

Proposes arguments for, and examples of, a radical democratic technopolitics that will use innovative technologies to advance the interests of oppositional social groups and movements that have been excluded from mainstream media and political debate. Arguments against technopolitics; Democratization of computers and information.

In Part One of this series it was suggested that in order to hold technologies to moral account a number of objections must be overcome: the argument that only humans are morally accountable, the ?passive instrument? argument, the ?dumb instrument? argument, the ?free will? argument, and the ?dilution of responsibility? argument. In Part Two, the ?human exclusivity? argument was refuted, and here in Part Three the ?passive instrument? objection is considered. This particular objection to the moral inclusion of technologies asserts that technologies do not act in the world, but are acted upon by humans, or are at most, intermediaries in actions undertaken by humans. The objection is not so much that technologies do not act at all, for this is their very purpose ? scissors do cut, cars do move, computers do compute, a shirt does block the sun, a pet-rock does stop the paper from blowing away. In this sense it can be readily admitted by all sides of the argument that non-humans act ? they cut, move, compute, block and so on. However, the ?passive instrument? objection is not concerned with the literal fact that nonhumans act, but with the mix of human and non-human agency that is associated with the actions of a technology. Is the technology a passive instrument whose actions to cut, move, compute, or block are entirely attributable to human agency, or does the technology act in any significant way in an expression of its own agency? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the creation of online program through the Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA) to incorporate technologies into data analysis, management and curation of biocollections in the U.S. It states that U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program and to provide $100 in 10 years time from 2010 that can help NIBA to deliver information on the several specimens included in the biocollections.

The article presents a white paper about technology and engineering from the Ohio Academy of Science at Columbus. It notes that the natural world tends to be changed by technology through innovative processes, systems, structures and devices intended to extend human abilities. It adds that engineering is responsible for the development and application of technology. It also mentions that engineering improves technology while technology makes civilization.