Department of Science and Technology Studies HPSC2028 Thinking about Technology Syllabus Term 1 Web site See moodle Moodle site See moodle Timetable www.ucl.ac.uk/timetable Description An introduction to ways of thinking about technology, from historical, sociological and philosophical perspectives Key Information Assessment 50% Essay 50% Three-hour exam % Prerequisites None Required texts readings listed below
Module tutors Module tutor Jon Agar Contact jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk t: 020 7679 3521 Web http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/staff/agar Office location 22 Gordon Square, Room Office hours: See dates and times on door Aims and objectives aims The aim of the module is to provide students with the knowledge of the ways of thinking about technology, philosophical, sociological and historical. objectives By the end of this module students should be able to: Apply knowledge of ways of thinking about technology, philosophical, sociological and historical. Possess skills for interpreting technology in the modern world Module plan The course is organized as a series of lecture/seminars. In each class you will be expected to have read, and taken extensive notes, on key texts, and be ready to discuss the texts in class. Typically a class will be a mixture of lecture (introducing and contextualizing the topic of the class) and seminar discussion (based on the texts and your understanding of them). It is therefore essential to prepare well! The course is examined through an essay, described below, and a three-hour exam in the summer. In both essay and exam you will draw on the insights gained through your reading and through discussion in class. 2
Schedule UCL Wk Date Topic Activity Basic questions 1 1 6.10 What is technology? What is social shaping of technology? 2 1 7.10 Do artefacts have politics? Read: Winner 3 2 13.10 Common mistakes in thinking about technology Catch up read: MacKenzie and Wajcman Read: Edgerton 4 2 14.10 Does lock-in exist? Read: David Historical patterns 5 3 20.10 Division of Labour, Factory Time and Ford 6 3 21.10 Building power: Bentham s panopticon 7 4 27.10 Railway consequences: Perception and Organisation 8 4 28.10 Systems and Edison s invention of invention 9 5 3.11 Gender and Domestic technologies Read: Thompson Read: Foucault Read: Schivelbusch Read: Hughes Read: Wajcman 10 5 4.11 Dematerialisation and Control Read: Beniger Reading Week no lectures 11 7 17.11 Can machines think? Read: Turing 12 7 18.11 Is the world flat? Read: Nye Interpreters of technology 13 8 24.11 Marx and the Machine Read: Marx, Engels 14 8 25.11 Do Machines Evolve? Read: Butler 15 9 1.12 Can Machines be Ethical? Read: Suchman and Sharkey 16 9 2.12 Heidegger s Question Read: Heidegger 17 10 8.12 Tacit Knowledge Read: Collins 18 10 9.12 SCOT Read: Pinch and Bijker 19 11 15.12 Missing Masses Read: Latour 20 11 16.12 Play Read: Pursell 3
Reading list BASIC QUESTIONS Class 1 What is Technology? What is Social Shaping of Technology? 6 October 2016 What is technology tools artefacts systems technical knowledge know-how relationship with science relationship to society, economy, culture technological determinism - social shaping of technology Catch up read: Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wacjman, 'Introductory essay', in Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wacjman, The Social Shaping of Technology (Open University Press, 1985), pp2-25 Class 2 Do Artefacts Have Politics? 7 October 2016 In what ways do technologies shape society weak and strong forms of shaping Read: Langdon Winner, Do artifacts have politics?, in The Whale and the Reactor: a Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp.19-39. Also reprinted in MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985) Class 3 Common Mistakes in Thinking about Technology 2016 13 October Technologies in use - distinguishing technology from innovation revisiting technological determinism technology in developed and developing world importance of old technologies Read: David Edgerton, From innovation to use: ten eclectic theses on the historiography of technology, History & Technology (1999) 16, pp.111-136 Class 4 Does Lock-in Exist? 14 October 2016 Limits of choice in technologies standards - technologies in use (reprise) QWERTY as an example of lock-in Read: Paul David Clio and the economics of QWERTY, American Economic Review (1985) 75(2), pp.332-337 4
HISTORICAL PATTERNS Class 5 Division of Labour, Factory Time and Ford 20 October 2016 Adam Smith on the division of labour industrial revolution clocks and factory time time and work discipline Ford and Fordism Taylor and Taylorism Read: E.P. Thompson, Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism, Past and Present 38 (1967), pp56-97 Class 6 Building Power: Bentham s Panopticon 21 October 2016 Buildings as technology materiality and power Bentham s panopticon Foucault Read: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, 1975, New York: Vintage, 1977, part III, chapter III Class 7 Railway consequences: Perception and Organisation 27 October 2016 Railways perception of time and space corporations business history Read: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986, excerpt Class 8 Systems and Edison s Invention of Invention 28 October 2016 Technological systems Hughes s model of growth of systems Edison as systems builder Read: Thomas P. Hughes, The Evolution of Large Technological Systems, in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Large Technological Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.51-82 5
Class 9 Gender and Domestic technologies 3 November 2016 Gender as a factor in the social shaping of technology domestic technologies industrialization of the home Read: Judy Wajcman, From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience, Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 3 (2007): 287 98. Class 10 Dematerialisation and Control 4 November 2016 Cronon on the dematerialization Beniger on control revolution historiography of information Read: James Beniger, Chapter Six: Industrial revolution and the crisis in control in Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 Class 11 Can Machines Think? 17 November 2016 History of the computer Turing artificial intelligence Read: Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence, Mind (1950) 59, pp.433-460 Class 12 Is the World Flat? 18 November 2016 Technology and globalization technology and global cultural change Friedman finance Read: David E. Nye, Chapter 5: Cultural uniformity, or diversity?, in Technology Matters: Questions to Live with, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006, pp.67-86. INTERPRETERS OF TECHNOLOGY Class 13 Marx and the Machine 24 November 2016 Marx Marxism as a theory of technology Engels Read: Extracts from Marx, Capital, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, and Engels, Dialectics of Nature, and Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, in Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (eds.), Philosophy of Technology: the Technological Condition. An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 66-79. 6
Class 14 Do Machines Evolve? 25 November 2016 Evolutionary theories of technology Darwin and Butler W. Brian Arthur Read: Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872, from end of Chapters 22 to Chapter 25: The Book of the Machines (pp187-219 in Penguin edition), or Darwin among the machines, 1863, which can be found in anthologies Class 15 Can Machines be Ethical? 1 December 2016 Data decision-making - drones Read: Lucy Suchman and Noel Sharkey, Wishful Mnemonics and Autonomous Killing Machines, AISB Quarterly (2013), pp. 14-22. Class 16 Heidegger s Question 2 December 2016 Heidegger philosophy of technology Read: Martin Heidegger, The question concerning technology, reprinted in Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (eds.), Philosophy of Technology: the Technological Condition. An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 252-264. Class 17 Tacit Knowledge 8 December 2016 Tacit knowledge Michael Polanyi sociology of science and scientific instruments Read: H.M. Collins, 'The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks', Science Studies (April 1974) 4(2), pp.165-185. Class 18 SCOT 9 December 2016 Social construction of technology sociology of science and sociology of technology Read: Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other, in Bijker, Pinch and Hughes (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, pp.17-50 7
Class 19 Missing Masses 15 December 2016 Latour actor-network theory posthumanity Read: Bruno Latour, Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts, in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp.225-258 Class 20 Play 16 December 2016 Play - creativity Read: Carroll Pursell, From Playgrounds to Playstation: the Interaction of Technology and Play, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015, excerpt 8
Assessment summary Description Deadline Word limit 50% Essay 16.12.2016 (TBC) 50% Three-hour exam - 2000 words coursework Essay: Discuss a technological object or system, drawing on ways of thinking about technology encountered in the course Suggested approach: 1) Build up a Project Dossier. Having chosen a technological object or system, build up a dossier that reveals how this object works (perhaps as part of a wider technological system) within society and culture. The dossier will be a record of your exploration of the social and cultural life of the object you have chosen. A good dossier might have the following components, or respond to the following questions: Anthropological notes. Record observations of how people interact with the object you have chosen. How is it used? Is it changed in use? How does the object affect people? What sorts of people interact with it? What do people say about it? What meanings does the object hold? If it s helpful and applicable, work through the 50 Questions from Hennigar Shuh (1982) What can be found out about the history of the object? Where was it developed, produced, sold? Who made it? Under what conditions? At what scales is the object significant? Is it part of a system? Build up a visual record: drawings, photographs. Make notes on what these visual clues reveal. 2) Reflect on which ways of thinking about technology might help in interpreting your technology in context 3) Draft and write your essay. Feel free to use your visual record where pictures help your argument. The essay will integrate your dossier findings with methodological perspectives and empirical comparisons drawn from the course readings. 9