[UPDATE: I came soon enough to realize that the neologism "technocriticism" wasn't really necessary or even particularly useful given the existence already of Science and Technology Studies (STS) , Media/Network Studies, Environmental Justice Critique, and even the venerable Philosophy of Technology all of which, taken together, more or less cover all the ground with which technocriticism would concern itself, and already have widespread departments, organizations, canons and publications, professional cohorts, constituencies and so on.]
Technological development is an ongoing provocation on personal and public life. Indeed, in contemporary technocultures continual developmental interventions into "given" norms, laws, trading conventions, and the customary limits of architecture and morphology, as well as the fraught practices through which we struggle individually and collectively to re-weave these disruptions into provisionally meaningful relations with our histories and our hopes constitute a definitive and abiding crisis of cultural life in this historical moment.
Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological development considered particularly as personal and social practices of research, invention, appropriation, use, distribution, discourse, and argumentative resource, rather than as the brute accumulation of a pile of useful inventions.
Technocriticism studies these prosthetic practices in both their technical and figurative dimensions, documents and analyses both their personal and their public uses, and often devotes special attention to the relations among these different uses and aspects.
Technocriticism consists in the documentation and analysis of, as well as critical engagements with, the prosthetic practices through which people individually and collectively invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools, techniques, and the multiform technocultures in which we are all of us ineradicably imbricated.
Technocritical theory can sometimes be either primarily "descriptive" or "prescriptive" in tone:
Descriptive and ethnographic forms of technocriticism can be discerned in elements of scholarship described instead as the history of technology, science and technology studies, or especially technocultural theory.
More prescriptive forms of technocriticism consist of the various branches of technoethical discourse, for example, media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory. Technoethics consists in the deliberative engagements of the multiple and contending stakeholders to the problems of technological development.
While technocultural theory and technoethical discourse are distinguishable from one another and irreducible to one another, technocriticism often analyzes associations, tensions, and interdependencies between their many dimensions and deployments.
[This blogpost reflects efforts of mine to propose an entry that could pass muster on Wikipedia for the term "Technocriticism." I was actually quite surprised to discover it wasn't already there, given the prominence of work by figures like James Boyle, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and many others. Anyway, it was a useful penance to hear the chorus of complaints that the writing in my proposed entry was hopelessly opaque and the topic utter gibberish (a prank? suggested one editor, helpfully), and offered quite a few useful lessons. Even if the entry is actually eventually effaced altogether through deletion or subsequent editing, I still consider Wikipedia a profound complement to an emerging academy that remains professional and socially indispensable and yet profoundly democratized through digitization and social software. It just may take some getting used to.]
Technological development is an ongoing provocation on personal and public life. Indeed, in contemporary technocultures continual developmental interventions into "given" norms, laws, trading conventions, and the customary limits of architecture and morphology, as well as the fraught practices through which we struggle individually and collectively to re-weave these disruptions into provisionally meaningful relations with our histories and our hopes constitute a definitive and abiding crisis of cultural life in this historical moment.
Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological development considered particularly as personal and social practices of research, invention, appropriation, use, distribution, discourse, and argumentative resource, rather than as the brute accumulation of a pile of useful inventions.
Technocriticism studies these prosthetic practices in both their technical and figurative dimensions, documents and analyses both their personal and their public uses, and often devotes special attention to the relations among these different uses and aspects.
Technocriticism consists in the documentation and analysis of, as well as critical engagements with, the prosthetic practices through which people individually and collectively invent, employ, and otherwise variously take up and make sense of our tools, techniques, and the multiform technocultures in which we are all of us ineradicably imbricated.
Technocritical theory can sometimes be either primarily "descriptive" or "prescriptive" in tone:
Descriptive and ethnographic forms of technocriticism can be discerned in elements of scholarship described instead as the history of technology, science and technology studies, or especially technocultural theory.
More prescriptive forms of technocriticism consist of the various branches of technoethical discourse, for example, media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory. Technoethics consists in the deliberative engagements of the multiple and contending stakeholders to the problems of technological development.
While technocultural theory and technoethical discourse are distinguishable from one another and irreducible to one another, technocriticism often analyzes associations, tensions, and interdependencies between their many dimensions and deployments.
[This blogpost reflects efforts of mine to propose an entry that could pass muster on Wikipedia for the term "Technocriticism." I was actually quite surprised to discover it wasn't already there, given the prominence of work by figures like James Boyle, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and many others. Anyway, it was a useful penance to hear the chorus of complaints that the writing in my proposed entry was hopelessly opaque and the topic utter gibberish (a prank? suggested one editor, helpfully), and offered quite a few useful lessons. Even if the entry is actually eventually effaced altogether through deletion or subsequent editing, I still consider Wikipedia a profound complement to an emerging academy that remains professional and socially indispensable and yet profoundly democratized through digitization and social software. It just may take some getting used to.]
1 comment:
Another form of technocriticism could be to use the idea of tracing socio-technical networks in order to be able to grasp technical systems and to build a new technology-friendly democracy: http://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/the-utility-of-network-analysis-to-regain-political-holds-on-technology/
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