Judging Technology
Western Cultures has had an uneasy relationship with technology traceable back at least to Plato, but particularly since the industrial revolution. For those of us living in the United States today, technology is one of our dominant influences. Technological development, which affects us both as individuals and as citizens, has had both strong advocates and vociferous critics. Most of us willingly acknowledge the benefits of technological advances to our health, our comfort, our freedoms, and our leisure. Few of us would willingly give up antibiotics and x-rays, air conditioning and central heat, motorized transportation, or the ability to listen to the music we love at the flick of a switch. Yet it is also clear that new technologies often have undesirable influences on these same aspects of our lives. Through the writings of such technology advocates as Buckminster Fuller and Vannevar Bush, and technology skeptics such as Wendell Berry and Neil Postman, we will explore both what we get from our technologies and the payments they extract, as we struggle to get a sense of the net impact of technological development on our lives and our culture. Students will consider various technologies in such realms as medicine, entertainment, education, politics and architecture, as they work at carefully analyzing written texts, formulating and articulating sophisticated arguments, and revising their writing based on responses from classmates as well as the instructor.
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