Langdon Winner: The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986)

“This collection of ten essays explores the social, political, and philosophical ramifications of the information technologies. While Winner looks at computer networking, nuclear reactors, genetic engineering, the so-called appropriate-technology movement and a variety of other specific issues, his main focus is on the way we think about technology.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press
ISBN 0226902110, 9780226902111
xiv+200 pages

Reviews: Craig Calhoun (Science, 1986), David Dickson (New York Times, 1986), James R. Temples (American Political Science Review, 1987), Stanley R. Carpenter (J Business Ethics, 1987), Slawomir Magala (Organization Studies, 1989), Scott London (1995), Heather Wiltse (2008).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Michael Adas: Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1990)

Thorough and systematic study of the role of ideas of technological and scientific superiority in the European outlook on non-European peoples. Covering the historical gamut from the time of Columbus to post-WWII developments and including a stunning array of sources, studies and quotations to buttress its thesis, it is bound to impress even specialists in the field, let alone general readers.

Adas shows us a look at the industrialization of Europe and the colonization of the non-Western world in a viewpoint that is supported and hard to dispute, even if it does not sit easily with the pride associated with being a “Westerner,” as are the majority of his readers. Adas has no problem with this, however, and dives in wholeheartedly. It is hard to dispute him on anything, since he supports all sides and arguments with equal voices in quantity as well as in quality.

The book won the 1991 prize of the Society for the History of Technology.

Publisher Cornell University Press, 1990
Cornell studies in comparative history
ISBN 0801497604, 9780801497605
430 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Andrew Feenberg: Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (2010)

“The technologies, markets, and administrations of today’s knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience.

Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.”

Foreword by Brian Wynne
Afterword by Michel Callon
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Inside Technology series
ISBN 0262514257, 9780262514255
248 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2015-12-22)