Resisting Technology - Ravi Agarwal
1. At what time did Engineers begin to be required to take humanities classes?
2. If engineers did not know anything about the social aspects of the area in which their technology was going to be used then how could they design a piece of equipment that was properly suited to the area?
3. If many scientific experiments are not useful in building and developing useful technologies then why do so many universities and companies invest time and money in them?
In the Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation - John Hopkins
1. Could forceful participation destroy the social structure?
2. Is it really in a person's interest to use his participation energy to improve the overall standard for living, rather than live for just themselves?
3. Are social networks actually pooling the participation energy or are they separating it through preferred computer interaction rather than physical action?
The Political Power of Social Media - Clay Shirky
1. If social media has only been useful for rallying people behind a negative causes or tragic events then can social media really be used to gain support for a positive cause with no negative background?
2. With the speed and efficiency of social networks spreading political ideas and ads is there any place for political figures to directly address the people?
3. Social Networks are an informal way of spreading information, are social networks bringing an age of no privacy?
Regarding the participation article and your first question: As an example, Václav Havel's well-known essay "The Power of the Powerless"
ReplyDeletecontains a profound exploration of the nature of power (as a feature of participation in a techno-social system) in an extremely hierarchically-controlled social system near the end of its existence. It is a system that "for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures." It is the application of power via protocol which exerts the control and eliminates (as that exertion becomes more and more intense) any spaces for autonomy to exist. But these systems reach a saturation point where the control (and feedback) system, a necessary structural part of it, begins to absorb all the energy available to the system overall—destroying it from the 'inside.'