Cyberpolitics Week 3: Technology and politics

Langdon Winner

Technological determinism and technophilia

Activist: John Perry Barlow: A Declaration of the Independence of

Cyberspacehttp://www.eff.org/%7Ebarlow/Declaration-Final.html

Academics and public policy sector -

Nicholas Negroponte: MIT media lab - one laptop per child

Alvin Toffler:the Third Waves

Business sector:

Tim O’Reilly: What Is Web 2.0?http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=nsa5ZTRJQ5w

Langdon Winner’s - Cyberlibertarian myths and the prospects for

communityhttp://www.langdonwinner.org/main.html

Social determinism

Technology is not neutral

1. Reproduction of social ordere.g Long Island bridges

2. Inherently political technologye.g Nuclear power and solar power system

Panopticon

2015 Epic: http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/

Class exercise: An examination of search engine

1. How does search engine generate their income?2. What are the distinctive features of search engine?3. Who / what control the operation / rank of the search engine?4. How does search engine affect our knowledge of the world?5. How does search engine affect our consumption habit? Who are the winners and who are the losers?

Moral issue and social actors

Different approaches to technology and politics:

- discourse / ideology / myth- artifacts - material forms of power- culture and praxis- political economy - distribution and social order

Workshop: Technical design of GPA1035