Social Anthropology of Technology

Pfaffenberger, Bryan

doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.21.1.491

Cited by 98 publications

(117 citation statements)

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“…These developments have a number of implications for technology studies. Traditional social science approaches to technology range from an extreme form of technological determinism, in which technology is viewed as a determinant of culture (Pfaffenberger 1992), to a view that the influence of technology can only be understood in terms of the meanings that people ascribe to it. The reality is much more complicated, and this complexity is reflected in emergent perspectives that emphasize both meaning and materiality.…”

Section: Intersections Of Anthropology and Technoscience Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconfiguring Nature and Culture: Intersections of Medical Anthropology and Technoscience Studies

Casper

Koenig

1996

Med Anthropol Q

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Section: Intersections Of Anthropology and Technoscience Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconfiguring Nature and Culture: Intersections of Medical Anthropology and Technoscience Studies

Casper

Koenig

1996

Med Anthropol Q

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“…Instead, culture and meaning can also drive a society's technological development. 23 For example, large water structures embody power and prestige in many ancient hydraulic societies. 24 Pumps in villages break down not just due to technological issues, but also due to intravillage conflicts and local politics.…”

Section: Scarcity Technology Rights and Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liquid dynamics: challenges for sustainability in the water domain

Mehta

Movik

2014

WIREs Water

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Water is essential for human well‐being and is a basic asset for productive livelihoods in many developing countries. It is also key to realizing most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Although the water MDG was met in 2010, 768 million people around the globe still lack access to safe and adequate water. Huge disparities continue to exist in access between rural and urban areas and rich and poor, as well as inherent social and gender inequalities. We argue that debates about access have so far paid insufficient attention to the long‐term sustainability of systems and services for accessing water. They have also neglected issues concerning uncertainty and social, environmental, and technological dynamics—particularly through addressing power imbalances and enhancing equity. There are two main reasons for this. One, discourses on access tend to be globalized and general, often disconnected from people's lived realities. Two, the dynamic interaction among social, technical, and ecological/hydrological dimensions of water across multiple scales is not adequately taken account of. There is a variety of different pathways in which water systems of access might develop. There are also multiple understandings and framings of water, and the gathering of knowledge about such diverse understandings implies that appraisal of access needs to broaden up to include a wider range of perspectives to inform policy and political discourse. We thus introduce the concept of ‘Liquid Dynamics’ to capture an understanding of sustainability that takes on board issues of uncertainty, complexity, local knowledge, equity, gender, and power relations. WIREs Water 2014, 1:369–384. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1031 This article is categorized under: Human Water > Rights to Water Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Engineering Water > Water, Health, and Sanitation

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“…These implicit behavioral templates, or affordances, encourage us to behave in certain ways rather than others. 4 Less remarked but often equally important, we tend to naturalize the operation of our artifacts-to experience the artifacts themselves as part of natural reality, and to perceive natural and social worlds through the lenses that they create. 5 The processes of mediation and naturalization are old.…”

Section: Configurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configuring the Networked Citizen

Cohen¹

2012

Imagining New Legalities

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Among legal scholars of technology, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that the design of networked information technologies has regulatory effects. For the most part, that discussion has been structured by the taxonomy developed by Lawrence Lessig, which classifies -code‖ as one of four principal regulatory modalities, alongside law, markets, and norms.1 As a result of that framing, questions about the applicability of constitutional protections to technical decisions have taken center stage in legal and policy debates. Some scholars have pondered whether digital architectures unacceptably constrain fundamental liberties, and what -public‖ design obligations might follow from such a conclusion. Others have argued that code belongs firmly on the -private‖ side of the public/private divide because it originates in the innovative activity of private actors.In a forthcoming book, I argue that the project of situating code within one or another part of the familiar constitutional landscape too often distracts legal scholars from more important questions about the quality of the regulation that networked digital architectures produce.2 The gradual, inexorable embedding of networked information technologies has the potential to alter, in largely invisible ways, the interrelated processes of subject formation and culture formation. Within legal scholarship, the prevailing conceptions of subjectivity tend to be highly individualistic, oriented around the activities of speech and voluntary affiliation. Subjectivity also tends to be understood as definitionally independent of -culture.‖ Yet subjectivity is importantly collective, formed by the substrate within which individuality emerges. People form their conceptions of the good in part by reading, listening, and watching-by engaging with the products of a common culture-and by interacting with one another. Those activities are socially and culturally mediated, shaped by the preexisting communities into which individuals are born and within which they develop. They are also technically mediated, shaped by the artifacts that individuals encounter in common use.The social and cultural patterns that mediate the activities of self-constitution are being reconfigured by the pervasive adoption of technical protocols and services that manage the activities of content delivery, search, and social interaction. In developed countries, a broad cross-section of the population routinely uses networked information technologies and communications devices in hundreds of mundane, unremarkable ways. We search for information, communicate with each other, and gain access to networked resources and services. For the most part, as long as our devices and technologies work as Cohen, Configuring the Networked Citizen 2012 2 expected, we give little thought to how they work; those questions are understood to be -technical‖ questions. Such questions are better characterized as sociotechnical. As networked digital architectures increasingly mediate the ordinary processes of everyday life, t...

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Social Anthropology of Technology

Cited by 98 publications

References 0 publications

Reconfiguring Nature and Culture: Intersections of Medical Anthropology and Technoscience Studies

Reconfiguring Nature and Culture: Intersections of Medical Anthropology and Technoscience Studies

Liquid dynamics: challenges for sustainability in the water domain

Configuring the Networked Citizen

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