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Technological utopianism is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal.
Technological change (TC) or technological development is the overall process of invention, innovation and diffusion of technology or processes. In essence, technological change covers the invention of technologies and their commercialization or release as open source via research and development, the continual improvement of technologies, and the diffusion of technologies throughout industry or society. In short, technological change is based on both better and more technology.
Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological change.
Theories of technological change and innovation attempt to explain the factors that shape technological innovation as well as the impact of technology on society and culture. Some of the most contemporary theories of technological change reject two of the previous views: the linear model of technological innovation and other, the technological determinism. To challenge the linear model, some of today's theories of technological change and innovation point to the history of technology, where they find evidence that technological innovation often gives rise to new scientific fields, and emphasizes the important role that social networks and cultural values play in creating and shaping technological artifacts. To challenge the so-called "technological determinism", today's theories of technological change emphasize the scope of the need of technical choice, which they find to be greater than most laypeople can realize; as scientists in philosophy of science, and further science and technology often like to say about this "It could have been different." For this reason, theorists who take these positions often argue that a greater public involvement in technological decision-making is desired.
According to Robin A. Williams and David Edge (1996), "Central to social shaping of technology (SST) is the concept that there are choices inherent in both the design of individual artifacts and systems, and in the direction or trajectory of innovation programs."
The philosophy of technology is a sub-field of philosophy that studies the nature of technology and its social effects.
Technoculture is a neologism that is not in standard dictionaries but that has some popularity in academia, popularized by editors Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in a book of essays bearing that title. It refers to the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture.
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Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communication and Media Studies at QUT.
The alphabet effect is a group of hypotheses in communication theory arguing that phonetic writing, and alphabetic scripts in particular, have served to promote and encourage the cognitive skills of abstraction, analysis, coding, decoding, and classification. Promoters of these hypotheses are associated with the Toronto School of Communication, such as Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Vilém Flusser and more recently Robert K. Logan; the term "alphabet effect" comes from Logan's 1986 work.
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Cyber-utopianism or web-utopianism or digital utopianism or utopian internet is a subcategory of technological utopianism and the belief that online communication helps bring about a more decentralized, democratic, and libertarian society. The desired values may also be privacy and anonymity, freedom of expression, access to culture and information or also socialist ideals leading to digital socialism.
Social determinism is the theory that social interactions alone determine individual behavior.
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that assumes that a society's technology progresses by following its own internal logic of efficiency, while determining the development of the social structure and cultural values. The term is believed to have originated from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), an American sociologist and economist. The most radical technological determinist in the United States in the 20th century was most likely Clarence Ayres who was a follower of Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. William Ogburn was also known for his radical technological determinism and his theory on cultural lag.
Anne Marie Balsamo is a writer who focuses on the connections between art, culture, gender, and technology.
Mutual shaping suggests that society and technology are not mutually exclusive to one another and, instead, influence and shape each other. This process is a combination of social determinism and technological determinism. The term mutual shaping was developed through science and technology studies (STS) in an attempt to explain the detailed process of technological design. Mutual shaping is argued to have a more comprehensive understanding of the development of new media because it considers technological and social change as directly affecting the other.
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References
- ↑ Green, Lelia Technoculture Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest p. 3
- ↑ Green, Lelia Technoculture Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest p. 9
- ↑ Gouseti, Anastasia (2011). "The internet: an introduction to new media". Learning, Media and Technology. 36 (4): 453–454. doi:10.1080/17439884.2011.588606. S2CID 60776435.
- ↑ Sinclair, Jim (2002). "Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex". Journal of Sociology. 38 (3). doi:10.1177/144078330203800314. S2CID 143322221.
