The University of California, Santa Barbara is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers' college, UCSB joined the University of California system in 1944. It is the third-oldest undergraduate campus in the system, after UC Berkeley and UCLA.
Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.
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.
Science and technology studies (STS) or science, technology, and society is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts.
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.
Henry Tzu-Yow Yang is a Taiwanese-American mechanical engineer, university administrator, and the fifth and current chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a post he has held since 1994.
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."
Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is a labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
There are several approaches to defining the substance and scope of technology policy.
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).
The College of Engineering (CoE) is one of the three undergraduate colleges at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The College of Engineering (CoE) at UC Santa Barbara is consistently ranked among the upper echelon of engineering schools globally. The College offers a mid-sized, interdisciplinary environment where innovation drives the development of both fundamental science and applied technology solutions, adding value to the economy locally and globally.
Paul M. Leonardi was the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was also the Investment Group of Santa Barbara Founding Director of the Master of Technology Management Program. Leonardi moved to UCSB to found the Technology Management Program and start its Master of Technology Management and Ph.D. programs. Before joining UCSB, Leonardi was a faculty member in the School of Communication, the McCormick School of Engineering, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
The Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara was founded in 1999 to support the interdisciplinary study of the cultural transitions and social innovations associated with contemporary information technology. CITS accomplishes this by connecting scholars in different disciplines studying similar phenomena related to technology and society, through both formal events and informal meetings of the center's faculty research affiliates. Currently, CITS faculty represent 13 departments on campus, spanning the Social Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the Humanities. In addition, the center supports graduate study through the administration of the Technology & Society Emphasis on campus. CITS is housed in the campus Office of Research, as a unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research at the university.
Networked advocacy or net-centric advocacy refers to a specific type of advocacy. While networked advocacy has existed for centuries, it has become significantly more efficacious in recent years due in large part to the widespread availability of the internet, mobile telephones, and related communications technologies that enable users to overcome the transaction costs of collective action.
Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence is a 1978 book by the philosopher G. A. Cohen, the culmination of his attempts to reformulate Karl Marx's doctrines of alienation, exploitation, and historical materialism. Cohen, who interprets Marxism as a scientific theory of history, applies the techniques of analytic philosophy to the elucidation and defence of Marx's materialist conception of history.
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory in assuming 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 as well as John Dewey. William Ogburn was also known for his radical technological determinism and his theory on cultural lag.
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.
Sociotechnology is the study of processes on the intersection of society and technology. Vojinović and Abbott define it as "the study of processes in which the social and the technical are indivisibly combined". Sociotechnology is an important part of socio-technical design, which is defined as "designing things that participate in complex systems that have both social and technical aspects".
Robert W. Duggan is an American billionaire, entrepreneur, philanthropist, biotech executive, health care executive, educator, and human rights activist. He is the former CEO of biopharmaceutical company Pharmacyclics and was previously CEO of surgical systems maker Computer Motion from 1997 to 2003. Bob is the majority shareholder and is on the boards of directors of Pulse Biosciences and Summit Therapeutics, where he is also CEO.
Accelerated pluralism is a theory coined by American political scientist Bruce Bimber which claims that "the net is accelerating the process of issue group formation and action". As a method of mobilization, it relies on information communication technologies (ICT), particularly the Internet as a tool to promote all kinds of ideological projects or to form social movements. Bimber based his theory on the idea that "the processes of group-oriented politics will show less coherence and less correspondence with established private and public institutional structures".
