Walter J. Ong's classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought. This thirtieth anniversary edition - coinciding with Ong's centenary year - reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley. Hartley provides: A scene-setting chapter that situates Ong's work within the historical and disciplinary context of post-war Americanism and the rise of communication and media studies; A closing chapter that follows up Ong's work on orality and literacy in relation to evolving media forms, with a discussion of recent criticisms of Ong's approach, and an assessment of his concept of the `evolution of consciousness'; Extensive references to recent scholarship on orality, literacy and the study of knowledge technologies, tracing changes in how we know what we know. These illuminating essays contextualize Ong within recent intellectual history, and display his work's continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature and the media, as well as that of psychology, education and sociological thought.

Technology infrastructure supports the design, deployment and use of both individual technology-based components and the systems of such components that form the knowledge-based economy. As such, it plays a central role in the innovation process and in the promotion of the diffusion of technologies. Thus, it is an important element contributing to the operation of innovation systems and innovation performance in any modern economy.

Technology infrastructure, either in the narrow or broad sense, is not well understood as an element of a sector 's technology platform or of a national innovation system. Similarly misunderstood are the processes by which such infrastructure is embodied in standards or diffused through various institutional frameworks. In fact, because of the public and quasi-public good nature of technology infrastructure, firms as well as public-sector agencies under invest in it, thus inhibiting long-term technological advancement and economic growth.

This volume of essays brings together a collection of papers from eminent scholars on all of the various dimensions of technology infrastructure mentioned above. To our knowledge, it is the first such collection of papers and we expect this scholarship to become the foundation for future research in this area.

This book was published as a special issue of Economics of Innovation and New Technology.

A guide to the everyday decisions about right and wrong faced by physical scientists and research engineers. This book offers the first comprehensive guide to ethics for physical scientists and engineers who conduct research. Written by a distinguished professor of chemistry and chemical engineering, the book focuses on the everyday decisions about right and wrong faced by scientists as they do research, interact with other people, and work within society. The goal is to nurture readers' ethical intelligence so that they know an ethical issue when they see one, and to give them a way to think about ethical problems. After introductions to the philosophy of ethics and the philosophy of science, the book discusses research integrity, with a unique emphasis on how scientists make mistakes and how they can avoid them. It goes on to cover personal interactions among scientists, including authorship, collaborators, predecessors, reviewers, grantees, mentors, and whistle-blowers. It considers underrepresented groups in science as an ethical issue that matters not only to those groups but also to the development of science, and it examines human participants and animal subjects. Finally, the book examines scientifically relevant social issues, including public policy, weapons research, conflicts of interest, and intellectual property. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and case studies to encourage debate and further exploration of topics. The book can be used in classes and seminars in research ethics and will be an essential reference for scientists in academia, government, and industry.

This Handbook constitutes a global resource for the fast-growing interdisciplinary research and policy communities that have taken on the challenge of driving innovation towards socially desirable outcomes. The collection brings together well-known authors from the USA, Europe, Asia and South Africa, developing conceptual and regional perspectives on responsible innovation including issues of governance, economics and ethics. The authors explore the prospects for the further implementation of responsible innovation in emerging technological practices in sectors from agriculture and health-care to nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. The collection emphasises the socio-economic and normative dimensions of innovation, including issues of social risk and sustainability.

The new edition of this authoritative introduction to the philosophy of technology includes recent developments in the subject, while retaining the range and depth of its selection of seminal contributions and its much-admired editorial commentary. * Remains the most comprehensive anthology on the philosophy of technology available * Includes editors insightful section introductions and critical summaries for each selection * Revised and updated to reflect the latest developments in the field * Combines difficult to find seminal essays with a judicious selection of contemporary material * Examines the relationship between technology and the understanding of the nature of science that underlies technology studies

Studying religion in college or university? This book shows you how to perform well on your course tests and examinations, write successful papers, and participate meaningfully in class discussions. You'll learn new skills and also enhance existing ones, which you can put into practice with in-text exercises and assignments. Written by two award-winning instructors, this book identifies the close reading of texts, material culture, and religious actions as the fundamental skill for the study of religion at undergraduate level. It shows how critical analytical thinking about religious actions and ideas is founded on careful, patient, yet creative "reading" of religious stories, rituals, objects, and spaces. The book leads you through the description, analysis, and interpretation of examples from multiple historical periods, cultures, and religious traditions, including primary source material such as Matthew 6:9-13 (the Lord's Prayer), the gohonzon scroll of the Japanese new religion Soka Gakkai, and the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). It provides you with typical assignments you will encounter in your studies, showing you how you might approach tasks such as reflective, interpretive or summary essays. Further resources, found on the book's website, include bibliographies, and links to useful podcasts.

Colin Farrelly contemplates the various ethical and social quandaries raised by the genetic revolution. Recent biomedical advances such as genetic screening, gene therapy and genome editing might be used to promote equality of opportunity, reproductive freedom, healthy aging, and the prevention and treatment of disease. But these technologies also raise a host of ethical questions: Is the idea of "genetically engineering" humans a morally objectionable form of eugenics? Should parents undergoing IVF be permitted to screen embryos for the sex of their offspring? Would it be ethical to alter the rate at which humans age, greatly increasing longevity at a time when the human population is already at potentially unsustainable levels? Farrelly applies an original virtue ethics framework to assess these and other challenges posed by the genetic revolution. Chapters discuss virtue ethics in relation to eugenics, infectious and chronic disease, evolutionary biology, epigenetics, happiness, reproductive freedom and longevity. This fresh approach creates a roadmap for thinking ethically about technological progress that will be of practical use to ethicists and scientists for years to come. Accessible in tone and compellingly argued, this book is an ideal introduction for students of bioethics, applied ethics, biomedical sciences, and related courses in philosophy and life sciences.

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

Amid melting glaciers, rising waters, and spreading droughts, Earth has ceased to tolerate our pretense of mastery over it. But how can we confront climate change when political crises keep exploding in the present? Noted ecotheologian and feminist philosopher of religion Catherine Keller reads the feedback loop of political and ecological depredation as secularized apocalypse. Carl Schmitt's political theology of the sovereign exception sheds light on present ideological warfare; racial, ethnic, economic, and sexual conflict; and hubristic anthropocentrism. If the politics of exceptionalism are theological in origin, she asks, should we not enlist the world's religious communities as part of the resistance? Keller calls for dissolving the opposition between the religious and the secular in favor of a broad planetary movement for social and ecological justice. When we are confronted by populist, authoritarian right wings founded on white male Christian supremacism, we can counter with a messianically charged, often unspoken theology of the now-moment, calling for a complex new public. Such a political theology of the earth activates the world's entangled populations, joined in solidarity and committed to revolutionary solutions to the entwined crises of the Anthropocene.

""Designs on Nature" is a brilliant book that represents a major contribution to a vast and growing literature on biotechnology and bioethics. Professor Jasanoff tackles a complex topic with ease and humor that will appeal to students, scholars, and decision makers. There is nothing else available that comes close to her rich and detailed analysis."--Paulette Kurzer, University of Arizona, author of "Markets and Moral Regulation"

"Jasanoff provides an excellent guide to the public and political issues arising from biotechnology while also addressing the wider context of scientific governance and what has become known as the 'public understanding of science.' She makes a powerful and persuasive case both for the social and political significance of biotechnology and for a specific form of scholarly analysis that is both theoretically informed and empirically aware. Highly readable and very informative for those who have little background knowledge of these issues (and indeed for those with substantial background), this book will become the standard text on the political management of biotechnology and the politics of science and technology more broadly."--Alan Irwin, University of Liverpool, author of "Sociology and the Environment and Citizen Science"

"Using the interdisciplinary resources of Science and Technology Studies in an intellectually subtle, rigorous, and empirically sensitive way across three different national arenas, Sheila Jasanoff here provides an unequalled comparative perspective on the common yet differential struggles of modern political cultures and their institutions to get to grips with the challenges of controlling biological scientific knowledge practicesin the public interest. She deftly exposes and insightfully explores the twin projects wherein modern scientific knowledge and its institutional and cultural contexts tacitly coproduce each other, whilst constructing the domains of scientific knowledge and cultural politics as if categorically distinct. A further key twist is provided by Jasanoff in the exposure of the tacit processes whereby policy and scientific institutions at the same time produce imagined idioms of their respective publics and democratic cultural arenas. This book offers crucial resources, and challenges, to several disciplines, notably political science, public law, anthropology, policy analysis and sociology--not to mention to the life sciences themselves."--Brian Wynne, Lancaster University

Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a 1964 Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with." For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects-an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer-are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable. Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes-the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Winner of the 2015 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A New York Times Bestseller Top Business Book of 2015 at Forbes One of NBCNews.com 12 Notable Science and Technology Books of 2015What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making good jobs" obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries,education and health care,that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work. We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading to understand what accelerating technology means for our economic prospects,not to mention those of our children,as well as for society as a whole.

The author explores the net effect - not just how it evolved and what it does, but how it relates to the way we live. Most writing about the Net focuses on a particular aspect: its use for business or its driving technology, for example. This book aims at a broader target.

The most important work by a key figure in German thought, Helmuth Plessner's Levels of Organic Life and the Human, originally published in 1928, appears here for the first time in English, accompanied by a substantial Introduction by J. M. Bernstein, after having served for decades as an influence on thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Peter Berger, Habermas, and the new naturalists. The Levels, as it has long been known, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources as part of a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings in turn as a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics-simply put, interactions between a thing's insides and surrounding world. On Plessner's unique account, living things are classed and analyzed by their "positionality," or orientation to and within an environment. "Life" is thereby phenomenologically defined, and its universal yet internally variable features such as metabolism, reproduction, and death are explained. The approach provides a foundation not only for philosophical biology but philosophical anthropology as well. According to Plessner's radical view, the human form of life is excentric-that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This "excentric positionality" enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. Plessner studied zoology and philosophy with Hans Driesch in the 1910s before embarking on a highly productive philosophical career. His work was initially obscured by the superficially similar views of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger and by his forced exile during World War II. Only in recent decades, as scholarship has moved more squarely into engagement with issues like animality, embodiment, human dignity, social theory, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of nature, has the originality and depth of Plessner's vision been appreciated. A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition. This modern philosophical classic, long-awaited in English translation, is a key book both historically and for today's interest in understanding philosophy and social theory together with science, without reducing the former to the latter.

Communication Technology and Social Change is a distinctive collection that provides current theoretical, empirical, and legal analyses for a broader understanding of the dynamic influences of communication technology on social change. With a distinguished panel of contributors, the volume presents a systematic discussion of the role communication technology plays in shaping social, political, and economic influences in society within specific domains and settings. Its integrated focus expands and complements the scope of existing literature on this subject. Each chapter is organized around a specific structure, covering: *Background-offering an introduction of relevant communication technology that outlines its technical capabilities, diffusion, and uses; *Theory-featuring a discussion of relevant theories used to study the social impacts of the communication technology in question; *Empirical Findings-providing an analysis of recent academic and relevant practical work that explains the impact of the communication technology on social change; and *Social Change Implications-proposing a summary of the real world implications for social change that stems from synthesizing the relevant theories and empirical findings presented throughout the book. Communication Technology and Social Change will serve scholars, researchers, upper-division undergraduate students, and graduate students examining the relationship between communication and technology and its implications for society.

During the Victorian period, the practice of science shifted from a religious context to a naturalistic one. It is generally assumed that this shift occurred because naturalistic science was distinct from and superior to theistic science. As Huxley's Church and Maxwell's Demon reveals, however, most of the methodological values underlying scientific practice were virtually identical for the theists and the naturalists: each agreed on the importance of the uniformity of natural laws, the use of hypothesis and theory, the moral value of science, and intellectual freedom. But if scientific naturalism did not rise to dominance because of its methodological superiority, then how did it triumph? Matthew Stanley explores the overlap and shift between theistic and naturalistic science through a parallel study of two major scientific figures: James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian physicist, and Thomas Henry Huxley, the iconoclast biologist who coined the word agnostic. Both were deeply engaged in the methodological, institutional, and political issues that were crucial to the theistic-naturalistic transformation. What Stanley's analysis of these figures reveals is that the scientific naturalists executed a number of strategies over a generation to gain control of the institutions of scientific education and to reimagine the history of their discipline. Rather than a sudden revolution, the similarity between theistic and naturalistic science allowed for a relatively smooth transition in practice from the old guard to the new.

In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as a commodity unto itself: French DNA.

Faith-Based Solutions to Caring for the Earth Climate change is a confusing and polarizing issue. It may also prove to be the most daunting challenge of this century because children, the elderly, and the poor will be the first to feel its effects. The issue is all over the news, but what is seldom heard is a conservative, evangelical perspective. Connecting the dots between science and faith, this book explores the climate debate and how Christians can take the lead in caring for God's creation. The authors answer top questions such as "What's really happening?" and "Who can we trust?" and discuss stewarding the earth in light of evangelical values. "Acting on climate change is not about political agendas," they say. "It's about our kids. It's about being a disciple of Jesus Christ." Capping off this empowering book are practical, simple ideas for improving our environment and helping our families and those around us.

In social theory and sociology, time and travel in technological cultures is one of the new and challenging research topics in the 'mobilities turn'. Yet surprisingly, contemporary practices of mobility have till now, seen only limited theorization within these disciplines. By analyzing historic and contextualized transit practices, this revealing book argues that travel cannot now simply be reduced to getting from A to B; it is an integrated part of everyday life. In this area, researching how problems can be identified as dilemmas and reformulated as design problems helps create a new vocabulary; one which will not only change the agenda in the debate on mobility problems in the public domain, but will also suggest new ways of theorizing mobility innovations. In this fascinating book, author Peters: develops a conceptual framework to study contemporary transit practices and evaluate innovation strategies gives new insights regarding historic and contemporary design strategies and regarding innovations related to travel in technological cultures gives special attention to electronic timespaces and ICT based mobility innovations investigates cases of travel in technological cultures, car travel, air travel, and cycling in Dutch towns. An original and provocative contribution to the emerging field of mobilities, this book will become an essential resource for advanced undergraduate, post-graduate, researchers and practitioners in the fields of sociology, geography, spatial planning, policy and transportation studies.

In this highly original book, Russell Blackford discusses the intersection of science fiction and humanity's moral imagination. With the rise of science and technology in the 19th century, and our continually improving understanding of the cosmos, writers and thinkers soon began to imagine futures greatly different from the present. Science fiction was born out of the realization that future technoscientific advances could dramatically change the world. Along with the developments described in modern science fiction - space societies, conscious machines, and upgraded human bodies, to name but a few - come a new set of ethical challenges and new forms of ethics. Blackford identifies these issues and their reflection in science fiction. His fascinating book will appeal to anyone with an interest in philosophy or science fiction, or in how they interact. "This is a seasoned, balanced analysis of a major issue in our thinking about the future, seen through the lens of science fiction, a central art of our time. Everyone from humanists to technologists should study these ideas and examples. Blackford's book is wise and savvy, and a delight to read as well." Greg Benford, author of Timescape.

An investigation of artists' engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods. "Machine art" is neither a movement nor a genre, but encompasses diverse ways in which artists engage with technical systems. In this book, Andreas Broeckmann examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people's relationships with machines. In the course of his investigation, Broeckmann traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works by avant-garde artists in the 1910s and 1920s. An art historical perspective, he argues, might change our views of recent works that seem to be driven by new media technologies but that in fact continue a century-old artistic exploration. Broeckmann investigates critical aspects of machine aesthetics that characterized machine art until the 1960s and then turns to specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy, looking in particular at the work of the Canadian artist David Rokeby; vision and image, and the advent of technical imaging; and the human body, using the work of the Australian artist Stelarc as an entry point to art that couples the machine to the body, mechanically or cybernetically. Finally, Broeckmann argues that systems thinking and ecology have brought about a fundamental shift in the meaning of technology, which has brought with it a rethinking of human subjectivity. He examines a range of artworks, including those by the Japanese artist Seiko Mikami, whose work exemplifies the shift.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'An elegant, thoughtful book . . . beautifully expresses the importance and experience of liberation from the battery-hen life of constant connection.' Daily Mail 'I came away from this book a better human being. Michael Harris's take on existence is calm, unique, and makes one's soul feel good.' Douglas Coupland Solitude is a rapidly vanishing experience. Our society now embraces sharing like never before: time alone is being forced out of our lives by the constant pings of smartphones and pokes of social media. But what if being alone still has something to offer us - something we have forgotten, but that we still desperately need? In Solitude, award-winning author Michael Harris examines why being alone matters now more than ever before. He reflects on the paradoxical feeling of isolation that emerges from being constantly connected - and on how learning the beauty of solitude can help us escape it. After all, it is when we are alone that we realise the greatest truths about ourselves. Being alone - really alone - could be the only antidote to the frenzy of our digital age. Rich with stories about the transformative power of solitude, and drawing on the research of the world's leading neuroscientists and behavioural psychologists, Solitude offers a timely and profound exploration of how to be alone - and why it matters for us all. 'A timely, eloquent provocation to daydream and wander.' Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall

If a `robot' could do your job quicker than you and better than you for no pay, would you still be employed? Today it's travel agents, data-analyst and paralegals whose jobs are under threat. Soon it will be doctors, taxi-drivers and, ironically, even computer programmers. Without a radical reassessment of our economic and political structures, we risk the implosion of the capitalist economy itself. In a frightening tour of artificial intelligence's rapid advances, technology expert Martin Ford draws on a wealth of economic data from both the US and the UK to outline the terrifying societal implications of the robots' rise. From health and education to finance and technology, his warning is stark: any job that is on some level routine is likely to be automated and if we are to see a future of prosperity rather than catastrophe we must act now.