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This lecture exists as slides, which can be found here.
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The purpose of this class is to deepen your conceptual understanding of technology. In particular, we will be developing a critical relationship to technology.
We will be asking questions like
I would like to introduce this class by describing a framework that we will use throughout the semester. The framework is loosely based around the ideas of Michel Foucault.
At the core of this framework is an idea we’ll call social reality. Social reality is a shared perception of reality that we uphold through various arrangements. Social reality is often hidden. Paradoxically, this is because it feels very obvious — as if reality is naturally the way that perceive it. We don't notice social reality because it seems unquestionable.
This class' central thesis is that technology has something to do with the production of social reality.
An often cited example is the railroad. This may come as surprise, but the concept of standardized time did not exist until the railroad. Before then, it simply did not matter if clocks differed between two locations.
The first railways began in the mid-to-late 18th century as a means to carry coal out of mines. (Although the locomotive didn't really exist until about 1801.) By the 1820s, we see people advocating for railroads as a means of public transportation
In part, we see this movement underpinned by the public imagination of the locomotive engine. Recent tax changes on grain meant that it was more expensive to keep animals fed than to buy coal for locomotives. Coal was so concentrated in England that it was imagined to be limitless.
(Of course it was not actually limitless. And in fact at this time we actually do see some French intellectuals arguing in favor of animal power as renewable energy, for fear of running out of coal. For those of you interested in sustainability, here's an early reference for you)
In 1825, the Stockton-Darlington Railway (a coal cart rail) opened to passengers. Passenger rail exploded quickly thereafter. The speeds made possible radically changed the public imagination of space. Distances now traveled faster were essentially viewed as being made physically shorter. This perceptual shift was exhilarating.
People describes the sensation that the world was shrinking. Railroad speeds topped off at 30 mph (48kph), roughly triple the speed of animal-pulled transportation the preceded it. Around this time, we see people talking in what was either hyperbole or was a genuine feeling of the concept of distance falling away entirely.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch described it as "the complete annihilation of space and time."