Technology and Social Agency
Title | Technology and Social Agency PDF eBook |
Author | Marcia-Anne Dobres |
Publisher | Wiley-Blackwell |
Pages | 316 |
Release | 1991-01-16 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9781577181248 |
The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.
Technology and Agency in International Relations
Title | Technology and Agency in International Relations PDF eBook |
Author | Marijn Hoijtink |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2019-04-23 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0429871759 |
This book responds to a gap in the literature in International Relations (IR) by integrating technology more systematically into analyses of global politics. Technology facilitates, accelerates, automates, and exercises capabilities that are greater than human abilities. And yet, within IR, the role of technology often remains under-studied. Building on insights from science and technology studies (STS), assemblage theory and new materialism, this volume asks how international politics are made possible, knowable, and durable by and through technology. The contributors provide empirically rich and pertinent accounts of a variety of technologies relevant to the discipline, including drones, algorithms, satellite imagery, border management databases, and blockchains. Problematizing various technologically mediated issues, such as secrecy, violence, and questions of how authority and evidence become constituted in international contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars in IR, in particular those who work in the subfields of (critical) security studies, International Political Economy, and Global Governance. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Inside the Politics of Technology
Title | Inside the Politics of Technology PDF eBook |
Author | Hans Harbers |
Publisher | Amsterdam University Press |
Pages | 313 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 9053567569 |
Though the old saying claims that man is the measure of all things, the authors of Inside the Politics of Technology argue that the distinction implied between autonomous humans and neutral instruments of technology is an illusion. On the contrary, the technologies humans create simultaneously shape humans themselves. By means of case studies of technologies as diverse as video cameras, electric cars, pregnancy tests, and genetic screenings, this volume considers the implications of this "co-production" of technology and society for our philosophical and political ideas. Are only humans endowed with social, political, and moral agency, or does our technology share those qualities? And if so, how should we understand—or practice—a politics of technology?
The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Title | The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency PDF eBook |
Author | William Boone Bonvillian |
Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
Pages | 306 |
Release | 2020-01-09 |
Genre | Technology & Engineering |
ISBN | 1783747943 |
The authors have done a masterful job of charting the important story of DARPA, one of the key catalysts of technological innovation in US recent history. By plotting the development, achievements and structure of the leading world agency of this kind, this book stimulates new thinking in the field of technological innovation with bearing on how to respond to climate change, pandemics, cyber security and other global problems of our time. The DARPA Model provides a useful guide for governmental agency and policy leaders, and for anybody interested in the role of governments in technological innovation. —Dr. Kent Hughes, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars This volume contains a remarkable collection of extremely insightful articles on the world’s most successful advanced technology agency. Drafted by the leading US experts on DARPA, it provides a variety of perspectives that in turn benefit from being presented together in a comprehensive volume. It reviews DARPA’s unique role in the U.S. innovation system, as well as the challenges DARPA and its clones face today. As the American model is being considered for adoption by a number of countries worldwide, this book makes a welcome and timely contribution to the policy dialogue on the role played by governments in stimulating technological innovation. — Prof. Charles Wessner, Georgetown University The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’? This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.
Agency Uncovered
Title | Agency Uncovered PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Gardner |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 269 |
Release | 2016-06-16 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1315435209 |
This book questions the value of the concept of 'agency', a term used in sociological and philosophical literature to refer to individual free will in archaeology using examples from European and Asian prehistory, classical Greece and Rome, the Inka and other Andean cultures.
Best Practices for Transportation Agency Use of Social Media
Title | Best Practices for Transportation Agency Use of Social Media PDF eBook |
Author | Susan Bregman |
Publisher | CRC Press |
Pages | 334 |
Release | 2013-10-02 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 1040084567 |
Timely updates, increased citizen engagement, and more effective marketing are just a few of the reasons transportation agencies have already started to adopt social media networking tools. Best Practices for Transportation Agency Use of Social Media offers real-world advice for planning and implementing social media from leading government practit
Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency
Title | Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency PDF eBook |
Author | Aparajita Mukhopadhyay |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 429 |
Release | 2018-05-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1315397080 |
This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India’s colonial railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims that the colonised ‘natives’ were not bystanders in this process of imposition of an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of an oft-celebrated ‘tool of Empire’. The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining railway spaces as social spaces – a methodological index influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power.