As preparation for the final exam on the 25th, consider how you would write essays based on each of following quotations (drawn from the assigned readings), explaining, responding to, and discussing each in the context of work by two (other) authors as well as your own views. This is a difficult exercise, but if you can imagine the details of such an essay for each of the following, you are more than ready for Friday's exam.
"The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe it's only revolution we're addicted to. Maybe the form never matters -- socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic commerce -- who cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in one's own time."
Ellen Ullman. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (City Lights, 1997), p. 29.
"I take the trouble to bypass the drive-up ATMs elsewhere, I walk through the actual streets with real humans walking on them, all to get to my downtown palace of money. Its entrance is a pillared rotunda. Granite steps shadow the curve of the rotunda. Inside heavy brass doors is a plantation of marble pillars. The ceiling looks like gold. To open their stations, the tellers push back little gates of glass edged in bronze. A small bronze lamp circles each station in a private pool of light. We wait in an aisle of velvet ropes. Then, in a dim echoey hush, we exchange slips of paper, our money and its representations, with all the solemnity of a Eucharist."
Ellen Ullman. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (City Lights, 1997), p. 71.
"Once we had to impart our worlds through the work of writing or telling, and we had to gather our worlds laboriously from the promptings of writing and our fund of experiences and recollections. Now information is handed to us as readily available sounds and sights. Engagement with the world has been yielding to the consumption of news and entertainment commodities."
Albert Borgmann. "The Moral Significance of the Material Culture," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 90.
"Assessing the moral significance of the material culture, then, comes in large part to asking what the moral consequences of the rule of the device paradigm are."
Albert Borgmann. "The Moral Significance of the Material Culture," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 91.
"The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine"
Karl Marx. "The Meaning of Human Requirements," in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884, translated by Martin Milligan (International Publishers, 1964), p. 149.
"Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the face that everything is itself something different from itself -- that my activity is something else and that, finally, (and this applies also to the capitalist), all is under the sway of inhuman power."
Karl Marx. "The Meaning of Human Requirements," in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884, translated by Martin Milligan (International Publishers, 1964), p. 156.
"As long as technique was represented exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of "man and the machine." The machine remained an external object, and man (though significantly influenced by it in his professional, private, and psychic life) remained none the less independent. He was in a position to assert himself apart from the machine; he was able to adopt a position with respect to it."
Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson (Vintage Books, 1964), p. 6.
"Everything today seems to happen as though ends disappear, as a result of the magnitude of the very means at our disposal."
Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson (Vintage Books, 1964), p. 430.
"Scientific knowledge is not simply a matter of apprehending a nature waiting to be discovered. Nature is described and understood through the mediation of assumptions, themselves heterogeneously formed by generalization, analogy, and social and personal aspiration. But neither are our beliefs about the natural world simply a projection of our contextual values. The ultimate test of adequacy is experiential."
Helen Longino. "Knowledge, Bodies, and Values: Reproductive Technologies and Their Scientific Context," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 203.
"The danger, therefore, is not that biological research will find a way to make women (or women's reproductive systems) redundant and expendable, nor even that a genuine eugenic program is finally at hand. It is, instead, that the modest successes in the attempts to expand the domain of conceptive research, whether in the technology of conception or the correlation of genes with phenotypic traits, will continue to animate determinist assumptions."
Helen Longino. "Knowledge, Bodies, and Values: Reproductive Technologies and Their Scientific Context," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 208.
"Sade shows how the body has met its technical-industrial destiny, that the banal possibility of a post-amorous relationship has now opened up and that henceforth there exist techniques of pleasure that have no relation to either seductive desire or the rites of recognition."
Marcel He´naff. "Sade, the Mechanization of the Libertine Body, and the Crisis of Reason," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 228.
"But we must say that Sade is at the intersection of two worlds, the traditional one of aristocratic values and the operational world of technical efficiency. It is the appropriation of the one by the other that reveals the crisis of our civilization."
Marcel He´naff. "Sade, the Mechanization of the Libertine Body, and the Crisis of Reason," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 232.
"A tool is also a model for its own reproduction and a script for the reenactment of the skill it symbolizes. This is the sense in which it is a pedagogic instrument, a vehicle for instructing men in other times and places in culturally acquired modes of thought and action. The tool as symbol in all these respects thus transcends its role as a symbolic recreation of his world. It must therefore inevitably enter into the imaginative calculus that constantly constructs his world. In that sense, then, the tool is much more than a device; it is an agent for change."
Joseph Weizenbaum. Computer Power and Human Reason (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1976), p. 18.
"Power is nothing if it is not the power to choose. Instrumental reason can make decisions, but there is all the difference between deciding and choosing."
Joseph Weizenbaum. Computer Power and Human Reason (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1976), p. 259.
"As for the 'external' world, where clear divisions separate observer from system, human from technological artifact, Maturana, Dick, and Burroughs agreed (although for different reasons) that there is no there there. Whatever the limitations of their works, they shared a realization that the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed. In exploring how to integrate observer and world into a unified field of interaction, they also realized that liberal humanism could not continue to hold sway."
N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Post-Human (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 221.
"By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on the splice rather than being imperiled by it."
N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Post-Human (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 290.