Technology, Culture, Education: Introduction

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These are notes for Professor Varenne's Summer A class on Technology, Culture, Education that meets in 362 Grace Dodge Hall on Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:45 PM - 4:05 PM. Everyone is welcome to use and edit on these pages. If you need help on working on these pages, you can either look at the Help page, check out this custom made help page, or contact me. Aaron Hung

Link to Professor Varenne's notes for this course.


Contents

[edit] Class Outline

[edit] Readings


[edit] Discussion

  • I read somewhere that, in the Western world at least, technology tends to precede science (e.g. the way the Wright brothers, who were bicycle manufacturers, invented flight before the science of aerodynamics was created). Although "science" is not part of the course title, I wonder whether the sequencing of the three words - technology, culture, education - suggests a way of thinking about how technologies penetrate into the fabric of our social lives. Aaron Hung 13:09, 20 May 2008 (EDT)


  • That was an interesting thought, Aaron.

Are we to answer the three questions on technology, culture and education on this spot or on the study page? I have posted on the study page where I found the questions.

Thanks

--Marduignan 11:21, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

You can answer it on the Study page. Aaron Hung 14:27, 2 June 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Class notes

[edit] Introduction: What is education?

  • How do you know you're talking about education? Who allows you to talk about it?
  • What is the relationship between education and economic growth? (the correlation between higher education degrees and income)
  • What is the difference between education and schooling?

[edit] Computers and communication

  • Many people had to learn about computers outside of schools
  • How did Bill Gates get his interview with IBM? His mother worked there
  • Learning about history and how to manipulate people

[edit] Technology

  • course will start with irrigation and end with atomic bombs
  • technological deterministic view sees a chronology to technological discoveries
  • how do you study technology?
  • course will address:
    • the evolution of the relationship between technologies and cultural elaboration here each feeds on the other as human imagination produces new technologies with unpredictable consequences that then becomes the material basis for further elaboration
      • agricultural tools and irrigation
      • literacy
      • industrial revolution as intellectual and practical problem
      • latest technologies and new dilemmas they made for humanity
    • the evolution of theoretical approaches to the study of the relationship between technology and culture
      • Marxist/deterministic
      • idealistic
      • attempt to bridge the two
  • use of plow or hoe depends on conditions of the soil
  • cyborgs: machines are entering our bodies

[edit] Marx

  • "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." - Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
  • humans do not live by their biology alone
  • Gaia hypothesis: planet adapted to life
  • "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." - Karl Marx, The German Ideology
  • animals need to eat; you find the subsistence in your environment, but you do not make it
  • specialization leads to division of labor
  • V: not that material conditions determine who you are and what you do, but people who controls the means to production; they do not appear out of nowhere, but out of human history
  • what you do in the future is not inscribed in history
  • all these exist in concrete reality, not abstract "in your head"
  • societies need to constantly reproduce people for various jobs
  • Marx reminds us of the human side of machines

[edit] Dewey

  • interested in how people produce their existence
  • communication field comes out of pragmatist tradition
  • not simply a matter of language and representation, but the communication of meaning
  • how do people check that their meanings have been mutually understood in the way it was understood
  • Latour: even science labs are social machines that produce scientific knowledge

[edit] Culture

  • systems of communication are made up in our histories (culture*
  • communication rules are "arbitrary" to the task being done


[edit] Links

Helvetica
Since we were talking about graphic design and font, I saw a really great documentary called Helvetica that traces the history of the development of this ubiquitous font. If you have a PC, you can watch it for free at Netflix.
Our Own Devices
A New Yorker article discussing the idea of technology driving society.
The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits
An interesting NYT article about how technology companies are not expected to stay on top for more than a single technological era.


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