Technology = Progress?

In the article “Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?” Marx’s argument appears to be that yes, technology can lead to progress but an important question he poses is that where will this progress lead to? . The article focuses on the evolution of technology and how it was used to propel the people in the revolution and how it’s separation from social change. For this response, I want to focus on the question Marx poses at the end. I found it to be interesting because it appears to always be the assumption that if a country or a group of people are not up to par with technology then they are not progressive. However, this article provides an opportunity to question what is advancement and to think outside the box.
I am not implying that technology is bad but the assumption that technology in general is progress and that “… the rest will take care of it self” (pg 8) is something to be looked at. I thought it was a great a opportunity to look at today and see where technology has brought us. What is progressive? I want to look into something we al use in everyday life, something that probably every single person has is a cell phone. I personally am not attached to my telephone; I leave it everywhere. However, I, like almost everyone in class, know a person or persons who are forever tied to their telephone. So something that I notice, is when my friends and I are out eating , everything’s good for a while. Everyone’s talking and joking around. Then, it only takes one person to just check their phone and pretty soon everyone’s checking their phone. And then our conversations revolves around whom texted who what, what someone posted on facebook etc. Telephones have changed the way people socialize. I am not saying cell phones are bad but to be aware how it has changed or lives is interesting to me. Cell phone are important, my parents stress to me how I need to carry my phone and have the ability to make an emergency call, if an occasion should arise. But every year there is always something new coming out. Everything made simpler and easier are the ads for these new telephones. I don’t know how many IPhones have come out.
Something else, conversations can get awkward. We can all be talking in a group and laughing and then, someone gets a text and begins a furious conversation with the person on the other line. A word was created for this, which I learned my freshman year of college, it is called cupcaking. This is an example where technology affects how we live and the new terms that arise from new occasions that have been created by technology. I used a simple example but if a small device such as a cell phone can impact society this much, a larger technological advancement can affect more. So building on the idea that “…the rest will take care of itself” is that it’s not that it will take care of itself, rather it will adjust and the adjustment is not measurable. I thought this article was great opportunity to step out of the box, the idea that technology equals progress and look in. So judging a country or a group of people by their technological progress is questionable if we cannot look at ourselves and see what technology has actually advanced and changed. I just used the cell phone as an example.

To continue my exploration of German Engineering, I turn again to the original focus of my research—the environmentalism of Audi and BMW. I have been continually pleased by the substantial efforts taken by both companies to ensure sustainability. Both companies view sustainability as economic and environmental, and that they have a social responsibility to be as sustainable as possible. Again, and especially with Audi, I found that their commitment to sustainability goes beyond just the cars on the road. Parking garages covered with solar panels, water saving circulation systems in different processes of manufacturing, and even using engine tests to generate power and heating for the plants are just some of the ways that Audi’s engineers have shown that they are serious about their commitment to the environment.
“Green washing” is the term used to describe the over-use and often-illegitimate use of green marketing that many companies have used in their advertising campaigns. In a world of facades and false fronts, especially in marketing and corporations, it’s difficult to trust companies when they say that they are “going green.” Some companies even make small changes in some areas to provide data for their feaux environmental consciousness. Audi and BMW aren’t green washers; they have demonstrated commitment and it should pay off. Their green efforts are not solely inspired by their love for Mother Earth, environmentalism is also a business-savvy move. Sure they’re saving money on electricity, water and their heating bill with these sustainable manufacturing plants, but eco-enthusiasts would much rather support companies like Audi and BMW than companies that produce gas guzzlers at old, inefficient coal burning plants. Eventually, whether companies become subject to tougher environmental legislation (that’ll take a while in the United States’, shall we say, deliberate? Government) or they wake up one smoggy morning with a sore throat and a guilty heart (probably less likely than legislation getting passed and enforced within the next decade) or if they realize that sustainability is profitable (money always makes the difference), all automobile manufactures will take the same measures that the Germans are already touting. Audi and BMW are already ahead of the curve, and not just because they build finer automobiles, but because they recognize and strive for progress, it’s just the German way. ‘Vorsprung durch technik’… progress through technology. Simple, efficient, and well, progressive. Perhaps once the translation gets through to the American automobilers, they, too, will begin to advance. Detroit is a hard-working city, and it has been for a long time. It’s tough, and so are the folks who live there. It’s citizens have pride in their past, and luckily the manufacturing plants got bailouts to keep those citizens working… kind of. Tradition is important, we learn much from our history, but at some point I’d rather drive a car to work than a horse and buggy. Progress is the name of the game. The technology in stores is already outdated compared to what the companies are showing off at trade shows. The assembly-line was a wonderful invention, a hundred years ago, its time to assemble cars in line with the Germans, efficiently and sustainably. It just makes sense.

German Engineering (audi and bmw)

This presentation explores the characteristics of Audi and BMW automobile companies, with an emphasis on environmental protection protocol, within the context of historical trends in German engineering. Included will be a demonstration of the effects of French and British influence, and later, American and global market influences, on the development on German engineering, and their consequent influence on BMW and Audi. Progress and quality are the underlying themes connecting the companies, and a commitment to economic, social and environmental sustainability.

ReWired: Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies - Call for Participation

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HUMANITIES RESEARCH INSTITUTE presents
in conjunction with the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa 
 

SEMINAR IN EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL THEORY (SECT VII)

ReWired:

Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies

August 1-10, 2011 at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

The Seminar will address how technoscientific knowledge-systems are re-ordered when geo-political formations shift.

   You "don't invent the future," John Seely Brown famously noted - "you unleash it by leveraging the global community mind."

    Today the fastest expansion of technoscientific knowledge production and urban development is occurring across multiple Asian sites in the throes of techno-economic boom. Seely Brown's observation, made in conversation with Paul Duguid, was meant to characterize late 20th century knowledge institutions and sites of technological production in the US. It nevertheless uncannily predicts the radical de-centering of global technological futures in the 21st century, not least in the Asian context.

    The 2011 Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT VII) seeks to elucidate these rapidly transforming landscapes of knowledge production, the shaping of contemporary knowledge institutions, their impact on social life in intense urban contexts, and this century's techno-scientific horizons of possibility. Comprehending these movements, forces, and structures requires integrating deep understandings of history and politics represented by Asian and critical Area Studies with emergent work on the transnational dynamics of science and technology as well as on market economies and their modes of governance.

    The social life of information emerges in particular kinds of institutional structures and historical conditions. It refracts, reflects and embeds larger social forces and modes of production, extending some ideas and undercutting others. What are the impacts and influences of varying social arrangements and socio-technical assumptions on each other, and on learning practices and institutions? What sorts of networks are conducive to knowledge making now? How do the shapes and impacts of open source knowledge arrangements, for example, compare with proprietary ones?  What do these recent formations and experiences tell us about the knowledge institutions and production arrangements to come?

    Envisioning the technological future has too often seemed the province of western technologists. Recent media and economic analyses accurately identify the importance of new technological practices in contemporary Asia. Nevertheless, they often reduce complex historical processes to simplistic narratives: about the invisible hand of technoscience, or about the formerly ignorant attaining progress and becoming newly-empowered individuals and societies. The dominant questions that follow are equally misleading: Does information technology liberate developing countries from their legacy of poverty? Is Asian science as good as western science? Are women empowered by the digital revolution?

    This way of viewing things presumes Asian modernities to be marked by lack and belatedness. It views technology as the sole or dominant driver of social, economic, political and cultural change. It sees scientific ability as inherent to certain kinds of peoples. And it highlights the Asian "tiger "and "dragon" as representative of particular techno-political threats to US dominance.

Sect VII--ReWired: Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies--will seek a more nuanced understanding of these processes by engaging a diverse set of critical accounts of science and technology as they apply to the historical conditions of these developments in Asia. Computing practices, unlike older forms of technoscience from physics and mathematics to botany and forestry, are increasingly recognized as emerging via networks shaped by, in, and across the formerly "underdeveloped" world, including India, China, South Korea and Taiwan. The Seminar will experiment with juxtaposing histories of "older" sciences with the contemporary practices of "digital natives;" integrating critical knowledge of states, science, and social movements from the histories and social sciences of Asia; engaging studies of cultural production in Asian contexts; and broadening studies of peer-to-peer creative and community-based practices generated by the transnational digital sphere.

Asia has long been part of global flows of knowledge, commodities, and culture, all too readily overlooked in conventional accounts of its "emerging" development. Accordingly, SECT VII will avoid euphoric claims of radical novelty, as well as assumptions of simple continuity with colonial pasts. We approach Asia's disparate hybrid modernities without postulating a unifying Asian modernity, seeking to understand their various, often contradictory but productive discourses of science, technology, digital revolution, political economy, community, nation, and identity.   

    In this experimental critical space, SECT VII will seek to nurture, across disciplinary and regional borders, discussions of the kind that have not flourished within the more established Area Studies or disciplinary paradigms. The seminar space will be one of practical invention and intellectual innovation. We find continuities with other ongoing projects: most notably, the Digital Media Learning initiative of the UCHRI, and the HASTAC program, that aim to create "a generation of scholars equally at ease with current (which is also to say historical) knowledge in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, on the one hand, and with the technological, scientific, and engineering knowledge on the other, with a view to facilitating development of new discoveries and new relations between currently available knowledge sources, in order to digitally prompt new bodies of important knowledge." SECT VII similarly builds on the Poor Theory Manifesto developed out of UC Irvine's Critical Theory Institute that sees the past, present, and future as mutually constitutive and "heterotemporal", attending to the "unsystematic" and undisciplined "practices of the everyday."

SECT VII: ReWired is thus concerned with the large questions of infrastructure and information, social technology and technoscience, institutions of knowledge making and learning. It will be of particular interest to those concerned with Science and Technology Studies, Asian Studies, Global Studies, Digital Media, and their interface. And it will appeal to those drawn to theoretical modesty, tinkering and improvisation, appropriation and recombinatorial experimentation, to relationalities and rearticulations.

Dates: August 1-10, 2011

Location: University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Instructional faculty:
Itty Abraham, University of Texas
Ivan da Costa Marques, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Wendy Chun, Brown University
Joe Dumit, UC Davis
Roger Hart, University of Texas
Cori Hayden, UC Berkeley
Tim Lenoir, Duke University
Kavita Philip, UC Irvine
Achal Prabhala, Wikimedia Foundation
Sha Xin Wei, Concordia University, Montreal
Nishant Shah, Center for Internet and Society
Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University
Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia
Kath Weston, University of Virginia

Application Fee: $20

Registration Fee: $1250

Registration fee includes shared housing, instruction, and some meals. 

Applicants are urged to seek funding from their home institutions. A very limited number of scholarships may be available to full time registered students.

Presented by the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. For additional information, please visit http://www.uchri.org/sect.php or contact us at sect@hri.uci.edu or 949-824-8900.

Progress Report 1: The Untold Story of Technology

For my research project, I’d really like to expose the other side of technology and advancements of Western culture. For example, I feel that engineering, being born out of capitalism and modern technology, is a lot history. HIS-story is told, the story of the conqueror and it is the same with technology and engineers who create or implement this technology. We only see benefits and progress come out of it because we are the ones who are benefit from it, but what about the other effects that it has on other communities? What may be progress and advancements to us, may be taking a huge step back for others. It is important I feel to realize different world views and how these world views may affect how we view progress.

One example of where I got this idea is the emergence of a ‘new field’ in which humans study animals and their use of plants as medicine. This has been in existence for thousands of centuries, Native peoples’ have always done this, this has been part of the reason they have been able to gain knowledge of the plants and eco-system. This is exactly what I intend to explore with this research project, how we may feel we are using ‘cutting edge’ technology and ‘progressing’ because we are a superior Western culture, but, what if other countries employ the same methods in different ways, but are ignored simply because they do not compete with the West? What if others have more effective and efficient methods?

I don’t have a specific country that I’d like to look at, but I feel it’d be interesting to look at indigenous cultures and go from there. I plan on going to your office hours for a better discussion on direction I should take this.

I also think it'd be interesting to look more into the Academic Military Industrial Complex and how it affects our education as well as shapes our entire world view as a Western Culture.