Talk:Criticism of technology

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Technology

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Technology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.TechnologyWikipedia:WikiProject TechnologyTemplate:WikiProject TechnologyTechnology articles

article

I foresee this article being voted for deletion as original research.Yeago 16:26, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ahem

Are you guys listening? I really don't think this article is going to last. You really ought to change its direction if you want to keep it. For now, it is essentially a personal essay on technological criticisms. The reference to capitalism in the byline is a red alert for NPOV.

Some statements are so broad that there's really no way you can substantiate them

"The Internet euphoria of the 1990s favored more positive attitudes toward technlogy" - there is no way this can be verified. It would be better to find an author who has chimed in on this matter.

I honestly would consider simply making a very comprehensive subsection in the article of Philosophy of technology. Yeago 14:58, 30 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Or perhaps in Theories of technology. But I'd like to (a) keep the article and (b) help the article develop into something useful and worthwhile (but as a team). MaynardClark (talk) 04:37, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

original research

This article is clearly not POV and contains original research.

A couple brief points for anyone who's interested in doing a REAL article on this topic:

"Critique of technology" means almost nothing unless further clarified. We could be talking about anything from complete anti-technology people, or reactionary critiques of "further" industrializations, or perhaps even Marxist critiques of the "developed" nations not sharing their "gadgets" with the rest of the world... Honestly, I think this article might be better renamed as "Critique of industrialization" or something-- but anyway, here's a few critical theory books that deal more or less explicitly with what COULD be called a "critique of technology":

Ivan Ilyich, "Tools for Conviviality"

(talks in a kind of white burden way about our need to share our technology with the world. keep in mind that this point of view doesn't have to be so biased.)

John Thackara, "In the Bubble"

( from Amazon.com: “‘To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently,’ John Thackara writes. I agree! In the Bubble is the first strong, thoroughly documented statement on the importance of the local and the embedded in our fluid, hyper-connected world. A fundamental contribution to a new design culture.” --Ezio Manzini, Milan Polytechnic, author of The Material of Invention and Sustainable Everyday

Book Description We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World.

These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.

Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?

In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now -- not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology -- ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles -- above all, lightness -- inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation. ) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.166.140.209 (talk) 02:20, 16 May 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Reply to the objections

Drawing a clear line between writing an article (which includes a lot of research) and so called "original research" is impossible. This is only a pretext. What's the function of this argument? There is a strong tendency with many collaborators of wikipedia to reject anything which is not flatly positivistic. An encyclopedia is not a fact book.

The "not POV "-objection is equally wrong. It confuses the subject of the article (which of course is not "neutral") with the article itself. Turnbull is perfectly right when he qualifies Feenberg as anticapitalist and this is true wether one is procapitalist or anticapitalist. --Minority2005 13:38, 27 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed all of the tags from this article; none were justified, and no substantive attempt at justification for any of them has been offered on this talk page. What purports to be a justification for the WP:NOR / WP:NOTESSAY tags in a different section, above, is itself rambling and incoherent, with no obvious relevance to the article as it presently exists.

If anyone is inclined to replace the "original research" or "essay" tags, I urge that they carefully reread WP:NOR and WP:NOTESSAY before doing so. WP:NOTESSAY, in particular, is wildly overused in common practice, and is much narrower in scope than one would think from seeing how it is typically used in edit summaries and on talk pages. If an article is well-cited and based on sources (as this one is), rather than on the personal opinions of editors, then it is not a personal essay within the meaning of point 3 of WP:NOTESSAY.

Likewise, if WP:NOR were relevant here, it would be the section WP:SYNTH. But in fact there is very little synthesis in the article as it presently exists, sourced or otherwise. Improvement should be aimed at adding syntheses (although with sourcing), and adding much more detail. Criticism of technology is a vast topic. To the extent that the article appears incoherent (and I agree that it does), the source of the incoherence is excessive brevity and lack of detail—not unjustified synthesis or the expression of personal opinions.

Please avoid nonconstructive tagging of articles. Wikipedia has too much tag graffiti as it is.

—Syrenka V (talk) 04:34, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Future directions

Now that we have the article (as we now have 'technologies' of various kinds, subject to refinement and improvement), we also have the (array of) consequences, which IMO ought to be listed topically (rather than as alist of the various critics of technologies). For instance, if one cites 'harms' of one or more technologies, is one arguing as a consequentialist? If so, how are her or his criticisms developed? MaynardClark (talk) 04:35, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly not as broad as it should be and lacks coherence

Critique of Technology is not just limited to the points made in this article. It would be useful to also show the negative social impacts of technology as well, and perhaps further expand upon the ethics and gray areas of decision making in AI. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.51.93.151 (talk) 18:46, 21 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]