Not So Fast
Thinking Twice about Technology
Title Details
Pages: 240
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Hardcover
Pub Date: 10/15/2016
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5029-5
List Price: $30.95
Paperback
Pub Date: 04/01/2019
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5549-8
List Price: $20.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 10/15/2016
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5030-1
List Price: $30.95
Not So Fast
Thinking Twice about Technology
A critical examination of the character of technology and its impacts
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- Reviews
There’s a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, “How’s the water?” The younger fish are puzzled. “What’s water?” they ask.
Many of us today might ask a similar question: What’s technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we’re so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us.
Usually when we hear the word “technology,” we automatically think of digital devices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shopping, and social networks may seem, however, they fit into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We’re not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it’s right around the corner.
What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?
—Langdon Winner, author of Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought and The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
—Howard Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs and Net Smart
—David W. Gill, Professor of Workplace Theology & Business Ethics, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, President, International Jacques Ellul Society
—James Howard Kunstler, author of Too Much Magic, The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere
—Allen Noren, Vice President, Online, O'Reilly Media
—Roger Cubicciotti, former chair, Center of Innovation for Nanobiotechnology, North Carolina Biotechnology Center; Visiting Scholar, Department of Physics, Wake Forest University
—Bill McKibben, activist and author, Enough, The Age of Missing Information and The End of Nature
—Jerry Mander, Founder and Chair of the International Forum on Globalization, and author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; In the Absence of the Sacred; and The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws in an Obsolete System
—Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines and author of Thinking through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy
—Albert Borgmann, Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana and author of Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, and Holding on to Reality
—Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, authors of Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics
—Daniel Cérézuelle, President, Société pour la Philosophie de la Technique (France)
—Chet Bowers, Professor Emeritus, environmental studies, University of Oregon and author of Let Them Eat Data and The False Promises of the Digital Revolution
—Theodore A. Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology