Chapter 52 ~ “Anti Anticonstructivism or Laying the Fears of Langdon Winner to Rest” by Mark Elam, with Langdon Winner’s Reply (1994)
The first part of this piece is a write-up by Elam in which he discusses Winner’s anticonstructivist stance. Looking at Geertz and his thoughts on the “harmful pattern of intellectual …

Chapter 51 ~ “Luddism as Epistemology” by Langdon Winner (1977)
Winner begins his piece with a brief discussion of various suggestions (from Goodman, Bookchin, Marcuse, and Ellul) on how we can eliminate the problems that technology has brought (“brought” being a weak work in that we actually brought the technology into …

Chapter 50 ~ “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto” by Chellis Glendinning (1990)
Though there are those that believed Luddites were “reckless machine-smashers,” that’s not the complete picture for Glendinning. Luddites were fighting against a capitalistic society bred on power, resources, and wealth while trying to support their view of a world …

Chapter 49 ~ “Panopticism” by Michel Foucault (1978)
Foucault begins with a discussion about the plague and what happened in a town when the plague arose.
1- strict spatial partitioning
2- ceaseless inspection
3- strict purification
It is a town of segmented discipline. The chaos and uncertainty of the plague demanded a power structure be …

Chapter 48 ~ “Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet” by Hubert L. Dreyfus (1999)
I have to keep reminding myself that this was published in 1999. Even if the Internet were as Dreyfus imagined (or as he imagined Kierkegaard might imagined), things have changed in leaps and …

Chapter 47 ~ “Information and Reality at the Turn of the Century” by Albert Borgmann (1995)
We’re inundated with information – we get this from Borgmann’s first paragraphs before he asks, “Where does all this information come from and what is it doing to reality?” (571).
He first presents to us how information …

Chapter 46 ~ “Hacking Away at the Counterculture” by Andrew Ross (1991)
Ross starts his piece by discussing the paranoia that surrounds hacking and how computer virus – through media – were compared to medical viruses, such as AIDS. As I read these initial pages, I can’t help but to say …

Chapter 45 ~ “Heidegger and McLuhan and The Essence of Virtual Reality” by Michael H. Heim (1997)
5 Heidegger and McLuhan: the Computer as Component
Heidegger and Computers
In the initial section of this work, Heim talks about Heidegger’s thoughts on technology and how technology and the looming development of computers could adversely …

Notice my surprise when I went to TTU’s website today and found this link: http://today.ttu.edu/2009/08/comic-relief-from-textbooks/.
It appears that Jeremy Short, the Jerry S. Rawls Professor of Management in the Rawls College of Business, has published the first-ever graphic novel textbook on management, which is just out this summer. The first chapter …

For 5363, Introduction to Research Methods in Technical Communication and Composition, we have to do both a replication study and a micro-study.
For the replication study, I decided to imitate Maxine Hairston’s study, “Not All Errors Are Created Equal: Nonacademic Readers in the Professions Respond to Lapses in Usage.” What I …

Well, I feel accomplished. I finally calmed the thoughts in my mind long enough to filter through a topic for 5369 Theories of Technology.
Two of my research interests are online environments and writing instruction, particularly instruction for basic/remedial writing, and I had an idea of what I wanted to write …

In her essay, Arendt argues for a three-part division of human activities: labor, work, and action, in which (at least it seems this way from my reading) that action is the most important because it is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things …

Chapter 44 ~ “Technical Progress and the Social Life-World” by Jürgen Habermas
From Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (1970)
Habermas uses Aldous Huxley’s Literature and Science, to examine the relationship between science and literature and how science fits within the social life-world.
Essentially, Huxley sees two separate …

Chapter 42~ “Three Ways of Being-With Technology” by Carl Mitcham
From “From Artifact to Habitat: Studies in the Critical Engagement of Technology” (1990)
Mitcham begins his essay by revealing a question to which there is no clear answer: in the relationship between humanity and technology, which is primary?
Instead of falling into one …