2. What’s On for Today
• housekeeping
• learning objectives
• two ‘tests’
• technology
• technofeminism
Ada Lovelace
– examples and Lanström critique
• online/offline divide
• Castells
– mass self-communication
– counter-power
• where are we going from here?
3. Housekeeping
• no class next week
• no reading assignment
• BLOGGING continues
• Grades and Feedback
– email: tell me if you are not receiving my emails!
– 26 September blog posts: by Friday, October 4th
– 28 September blog comments: by Friday, October 4th
• Reading Assignments
– posted by noon Tuesday week before they are due
4. Blog Comments
• How to embed hyperlinks?
– <a href=“url”>Link text</a>
– <a href=“http://ourcourse.org”>our course
website</a>
5. Learning objectives:
• To critically evaluate social media and examine the social,
political and economic implications of habitual social media
use.
• To develop a critical analytical lens for viewing the wider
relationships between technological development and society,
particularly within gendered contexts.
• To be able to critique popular arguments about digital media
and society and identify technological determinism.
• To develop and refine digital media literacy skills through
writing and commenting on blogs (and our use of other digital
tools) and discussions about privacy and surveillance.
• To participate in a collaborative learning environment and
online community.
6. 4 Major Theoretical Frameworks
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM:
– strong tendency to view TECHNOLOGIES as CAUSAL AGENTS
– entering societies independent of social contexts and then affecting
them; humans have little power to resist
– especially the case with new technologies
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGY:
– HUMANS are the CAUSAL AGENTS
– we are the primary sources of change in both technology and society
SOCIAL SHAPING:
– influence flows in both directions (BI-DIRECTIONAL CAUSALITY)
– humans influence technological development; technologies influence
humans and societal development
DOMESTICATION:
– technologies NO LONGER agents of change
– historical perspective; humans stop questioning individual
technologies as they become taken-for-granted parts of everyday life
7. Test Yourself
Which of the following arguments is technologically
deterministic?
a) Since anyone can edit Wikipedia, and since so
many of us rely on it as a first point of
knowledge about a subject, our cumulative
knowledge is decreasing as a result.
b) Blogging has allowed anyone to become a media
producer, allowing any view to be shared and as
a result marginalized voices are becoming
stronger.
c) Both are technologically deterministic.
8. Test Yourself
You want to use the social construction of technology
approach to investigate the baby monitor. How do you go
about it?
a) Look at the impact that baby monitors are having on
society and consider what these technologies are
doing to the relationships between parents and their
children.
b) Consider the ways in which parents monitored their
babies before the technology was made available and
how parents have integrated monitors into their
routines today.
c) Investigate who designed the baby monitor, the social
context surrounding it’s invention, the marketing
strategies and the ways in which parents use it.
9.
10. Technology
• “The term itself can range from the latest iphone
5 to the latest atom bomb.”
• “When I think of technology, I tend to think of my
computer or cell phone. However, I now
understand it as so much more than that.
Technology is science and biomedical research.”
• Wajcman 2010: traditional conception
industrial machinery and military weapons, tools
of work and war; overlooking tech of everyday
life
11.
12. TECHNOFEMINISM
• traditionally: studying social groups that
actively work to influence technological
design
– but who is being excluded?
– women have been structurally absent
from spheres of influence gender
power relations
• Objects and artefacts are part of social fabric,
“never merely technical or social” (149)
• MUTUAL SHAPING OF GENDER AND
TECHNOLOGY
• “I would have liked to know how men
felt about these technologies being
created and if they had more control
over this.”
13.
14.
15. Landström’s Critique
• gender is seen as stable; technology as subject to
change
– gendered subject as determining factor
– due to reproduction of heteronormativity
• “feminine women and masculine men, who relate to each
other through sexuality” (11)
• “assuming that femininity and masculinity are mutually
exclusive and emerge from female and male bodies
respectively” (12)
• technology is not socially neutral
• gender is also socially produced
• I-methodology
– designers use themselves to imagine their users
16. Gender as Stable?
• gender identities of designers and users seen
as stable, existing before technology gets
developed
– “If gender is already there, as a fixed element it
can only function as a cause in relation to the
socially constructed technology” (10)
• instead, gender should be constructed during
technological development and impacted by
technological development
17. • ‘A female graduate engineer cannot dress in
lace and frills because she won’t be taken
seriously’, says one woman working as a
graduate engineer. Many of these women
have relatively clear ideas as to how they can
express their femininity. We can also interpret
this to mean that female graduate engineers
have to be ‘one of the boys’, or ‘social men’, to
be accepted and given career opportunities in
organizations. (Kvande, 1999: 305)
– (Landstrom; 11)
19. “battle over the minds of
the people”
“Torturing bodies is less
effective than shaping
minds”
(238)
20. mass self-communication
• “new form of socialized communication”
• “mass communication because it reaches
potentially a global audience”
• multimodal
• “self-generated in content, self-directed in
emission, and self-selected in reception by
many that communicate with many”
(248)
21. counter-power
• power: “structural capacity of a social actor to
impose its will over other social actor(s)” (239)
• “the capacity of a social actor to resist and
challenge power relations that are
institutionalized” (239)
22. ELECTRONIC AUTISM
• “Most blogs are of personal character.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life
Project, 52% of bloggers say that they blog
mostly for themselves, while 32% blog for
their audience. Thus, to some extent, a good
share of this form of mass self-communication
is closer to “electronic autism” than to actual
communication.” (247)
23. Where to from here?
• Critical Theory and the Prosumer
– Ritzer, George, Paul Dean and Nathan Jurgenson.
2012. “The Coming of Age of the Prosumer,”
American Behavioral Scientist 56(4):379-389. (M)
– Fuchs, Christian. 2009. “Information and
Communication Technologies and Society: A
Contribution to the Critique of the Political
Economy of the Internet.” European Journal of
Communication 24(1):69-87. (M)
FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMER; first to think of it as going beyond calculations, number-crunchingwomen were on the fringe: Ada Lovelace, it was the act of being pushed aside, that potentially contributed to her development of technological precursors to automated computing. As Plant puts it, quoting others, “[Women] have functioned as, ‘an infrastructure unrecognized as such by our society and our culture.’” Though man appears to have been at the center of certain developments, women were the actual “infrastructure”: Man once made himself the point of everything. He organized, she operated. He ruled, she served. He made the great discoveries, she busied herself in the footnotes. He wrote the books, she copied them. She was his helpmate and assistant, working in support of him, according to his plans. She did the jobs he considered mundane, often fiddling, detailed, repetitive operations with which he couldn’t be bothered; the dirty, mindless, semiautomatic tasks to which he thought himself superior.”rereading the point of disadvantage (the fringe) as one of invention
If you just look at technology, you are unable to adequately explain technological development nor use
http://thecyclingfeminist.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/musings-on-technology/That being said, although I can look back at my experiences growing up with technology and adopting it more and more as I got older, I also now don’t want to imagine a time when I live without it.
this analysis implies that femininity is something that women have and can choose to express. construction of women as possessing femininity, opposed to masculinity that emerges from men women will want to have a family and children – challengegender as an analytical fact – female masculinity is not a serious option
