Question

1. One of the major themes of the course thus far has been the double-edged nature of technology, scientific approaches, and “modernity. On one hand these concepts helped bring the United States into the modern world; spurring innovation, firing the modern industrial economy, and largely building the society that still is the basis for this country today. On the other, technology and scientific approaches inflicted terrible consequences as well; fueling racism, driving conquest, and making war much more costly. In your essay, first explain why “modernity” and the thinking that drove it presented so many potential pitfalls. Then provide three concrete examples that illustrate how technology, scientific approaches and modern thinking manifested in dangerous and even regressive ways. (Focusing on the Gilded Age, Imperialism, World War I, and the Twenties may be helpful here)

Answer 1

Over at the New Statesman, Steven Poole is Mad as Hell. Like Howard Beale within the movie network, he is now not Going to Take It any further. What's bugging him is what he calls "cybertheorists" (aka "cyberhustlers") the blokes and they are most often guys who are regularly "dreaming of a perfectible digital future and handing down oracular commandments about how the arena have got to be remade. As did many religious rebels before them, they arrive to carry not peace, however a sword. Exchange is inevitable; we must abandon the old approaches. The cybertheorists, nonetheless, are a especially corporatist species of the Leninist classification: they agitate for constant revolution but the fundamental beneficiaries would be the gigantic technology companies earlier than whose virtual photo they prostrate themselves".
There is plenty extra in that indignant vein. Who are these intellectual hustlers, these "Pol Pots of the touchscreen and Twitter"? Poole fingers the natural suspects Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson (simplest a "minor cybertheorist", poor chap) and a brace of Chris Andersons (one the ex-editor of Wired and the opposite the guy behind TED talks). To which one expostulates: what no Kevin Kelly!!! And where are Stewart brand, John Perry Barlow and Nicholas Negroponte, to call just three other cheerleaders for the digital future? If Poole is so annoyed, then he might at least have prepared a extra complete charge sheet.
Cynical web-advertising and marketing forms might view Poole's rant as what is famous within the exchange as "linkbait" when you consider that articles that namecheck prominent digerati have a tendency to attract tons of Google juice. But allow us to be charitable and attribute no such sordid cause to him. What his piece usefully highlights is a serious asymmetry in our public discourse in regards to the web and, indeed, about technology generally.

One mind-set about this is prompt through the work of Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist who was thinking about the system of financial progress. Considering the position of entrepreneurship and innovation on this approach, Schumpeter argued that capitalism renews itself in periodic waves of irritating upheaval. He was not the primary to have this thought, however he was the primary to come up with a memorable time period for the method: Schumpeter called them waves of "inventive destruction".
We're residing via one such wave at the moment, but our public discourse about it's lopsided. That is when you consider that the narrative tends to be dominated by using lovers and evangelists, by using folks who, like the "cybertheorists" Poole detests, are inclined to center of attention on the ingenious facet of the Schumpeterian wave. Even as, folks who're sceptical or apprehensive about the new technology are usually labelled and mostly derided as luddites or technophobes.

The problem is that Schumpeter intended what he stated: innovation is a double-edged sword. Digital science is indeed ingenious, in the experience that it enables us to do new things that were hitherto inconceivable, or to do ancient matters better. In the case of the web, for instance simply consider of the net, Wikipedia and Skype, all circumstances of technological know-how which have modified our lives, in general for the simpler.
But science can be destructive within the feel that it destroys or undermines matters which are useful: bookshops and print newspapers, for illustration and who knows? maybe even institutions such because the BBC. Digital technology has already resulted in a dramatic erosion of personal privacy. And it is enabling things which might be potentially or truly sinister government surveillance on a gigantic scale and at an unimaginably detailed level, for instance; and the progress of a few mega-firms such as Google, Apple, Amazon and facebook that could ultimately mediate most of our communicative acts.
Due to the fact that technology is both inventive and damaging, would it not be higher to have a public discourse about it that approved this uncomfortable actuality? Certainly sure. So why doesn't it happen? One answer, instructed a long time in the past by means of the high-quality cultural critic Neil Postman is that we are living in what he called a "technopoly", that's to claim a society where technology is simply deified.

"in view that of its prolonged, intimate and inevitable relationship with culture," Postman wrote, "technological know-how does now not invite a detailed examination of its possess consequences. It is the kind of friend that asks for trust and obedience, which most individuals are inclined to offer due to the fact its gifts are truly bountiful. However, of course, there's a dark side to this pal it creates a culture and not using a ethical groundwork. It undermines exact intellectual tactics and social members of the family that make human life worth living. Science, in sum, is both friend and enemy."