This course studies the interaction between society and technologies in a comparative and multicultural perspective. Some topics covered include the relationship between technology and human society; technology, culture and values; technology in the new global economy; development and inequality; electronic democracy; how technology has transformed work and employment; and the challenges of technological progress and the role that society plays in addressing these challenges.

Does technology bring people together, or drive them further apart? Does it empower workers, or threaten to automate their jobs out of existence? Are we being backward and “anti-progress” if we decline to adopt a new technology? To ask these questions is to ask about the relationship between society and technology. Is the relationship unilateral in either direction—that is, do technologies of objective necessity impose deterministic impacts on society? Or, conversely, are technologies always precisely engineered by social groups to achieve specific purposes? Is it some combination of both? The premise of this course is that we typically think about the relationship between society and technology, whether explicitly or (often) implicitly, in terms of the principle of technological determinism—that particular technologies of necessity cause particular social effects. This course proceeds as a criticism of technologically deterministic accounts of the relationship between society and technology. We will consider what it means—and what it doesn’t mean—to say that technology is socially constructed, and why a socially constructivist as opposed to a deterministic perspective matters for traditional sociological questions of social solidarity, inequality, democracy, and development.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills