Varenne: ITSF4026 -- Technology, Culture, Education III

This is the second in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.

Transition notes
Latour & Woolgar give us a general framework for investigating the construction of about anything that human beings do construct, together, including facts that end up being known as "scientific," and, by implications facts that end up being known as "technological" (or "educational," etc.). They do not specifically deal with the possible consequences of particular facts for particular people, or for the making of particular "groups."

Transition notes

Latour & Woolgar give us a general framework for investigating the construction of about anything that human beings do construct, together, including facts that end up being known as "scientific," and, by implications facts that end up being known as "technological" (or "educational," etc.).

They do not specifically deal with the possible consequences of particular facts for particular people, or for the making of particular "groups."

"Culture," in brief
1. (human history) as transforming (not abolishing) "nature" (physical ecology--from gravity to local weather and geographical features; biological constitution--from sexual reproduction to genetic peculiarities, aging and death).
  1. Transformation: from the individual vocal box and the sounds it can produce to a choir singing the music of a particular time for particular purposes.
  2. The scope of the concern for culture in the social sciences
  3. the definitions I work with
Technology as the things (facts) humans made that make them make new things (as well as repair the old)
1. A further introduction to technology as what human beings have made that they now depend upon to continue to live together "in the style to which they are now accustomed." For example:
  1. the body as amplified (handicapped) by technology. For example, focusing on sound/sight, speaking involves
    1. a transfer through
      voice (face/hands) ------------------> to ear (eyes)
      given certain conditions (see Jakobson's model of communication):
      1. distance (how far can the unamplified voice be heard?)
      2. physical conditions (how far can the unamplified voice be heard on a beach on a day of high wind and high waves?)
      3. amplification: from yelling to sign languages, flags, radio (how far can the amplified voice be heard given any number of conditions?)
  2. the body as amplified (handicapped) by the institutionalization of technology
    1. making the deaf -> dumb (dis-abled)
      1. not only a matter of mind-set
      2. but a matter of constituted policies with their attendant polities (people as agent of policies within their own system of constraints) and "discourses." (Scollon and Scollon 2004: Chapter 1)
    2. what voices get amplified for what purposes (Hollywood and pleasure, "all the news fit to print");
    3. how is what is heard identified as?
  3. Disabling technologies: "natural" interfaces, the whim of programmers, (and the impossibility of guidelines)
    1. the culturing of the functional (whim and arbitrariness)
      We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.
    2. disabling arbitrariness:
      "Also, a basic foundation of usability is that errors are not the user's fault; they are the system's (or designer's) fault for making it too easy to commit the error"
    3. and the ubiquity of education as figuring out other people's (and the world's) arbitrariness
Schooling as (expanding) (handicapping) technology
1. from skills
  1. generalized: "an educated citizenry"
  2. specific: literacy, human capital.
2. to "Success/Failure" in attaining various positions within a system of differentiated rewards. The evolution of explanations of "success" and "failure in school as paradigmatic of failure/success in careers:
  1. as cultivated capacity of an individual(through socialization and schooling)
  2. as learned difference (codes and mismatches)
  3. as what has been made to count for particular persons (through history and institutionalization)
3. to the web on linked conversations reproducing Success/Failure

Some questions in the context of this lesson If you want to respond to these you can do so by posting comments through the page for this lesson on StudyPlace
Find another example for the transformation of "nature" into "culture" using another sense than hearing (e.g. taste, touch, smell, sight). Do think both in terms of individual endowment and social amplification. Explore another instance of the transforming of another aspect of human biological endowment through technology (e.g sight, movement, physical strength, etc.)