The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients. High Tech Trash is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste issue and the health hazards involved. Americans alone own more than two billion pieces of high tech electronics and discard five to seven million tons each year. As a result, electronic waste already makes up more than two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead found in our landfills. But the problem goes far beyond American shores, most tragically to the cities in China and India where shiploads of discarded electronics arrive daily. There, they are "recycled"-picked apart by hand, exposing thousands of workers and community residents to toxics. As Grossman notes, "This is a story in which we all play a part, whether we know it or not. If you sit at a desk in an office, talk to friends on your cell phone, watch television, listen to music on headphones, are a child in Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story." The answers lie in changing how we design, manufacture, and dispose of high tech electronics. Europe has led the way in regulating materials used in electronic devices and in e-waste recycling. But in the United States many have yet to recognize the persistent human health and environmental effects of the toxics in high tech devices. If Silent Spring brought national attention to the dangers of DDT and other pesticides, High Tech Trash could do the same for a new generation of technology's products.

A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.

​A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.

Goldberg uses a multi-media approach to critically examine the most significant and volatile issues of our times: the environmental crisis, upheavals in the developing world, health, terrorism, and technology. The book is unique in its in-depth coverage of these pressing social concerns and its use of extensive media resources through a companion website. An introductory section reviews basic sociological concepts and theories, including the sociological imagination and class, gender, and race stratification all of which are revisited in each chapter. The book helps students appreciate the magnitude of the problems of the twenty-first century as they develop the intellectual tools to understand them sociologically and personally.Features of the text: "

Originally published: New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

The cry for and against computers in the classroom is a topic of concern to parents, educators, and communities everywhere. Now, from a Silicon Valley hero and bestselling technology writer comes a pointed critique of the hype surrounding computers and their real benefits, especially in education. In High-Tech Heretic, Clifford Stoll questions the relentless drumbeat for "computer literacy" by educators and the computer industry, particularly since most people just use computers for word processing and games--and computers become outmoded or obsolete much sooner than new textbooks or a good teacher. As one who loves computers as much as he disdains the inflated promises made on their behalf, Stoll offers a commonsense look at how we can make a technological world better suited for people, instead of making people better suited to using machines.

This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys draws together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.