Technology and Culture

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Technology and Culture

• Going beyond
• Modern Technology and Western Culture

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What is Culture?

• One of the most complicated words in English
• Worship reverential homage. rare.
• The action or practice of cultivating the soil
  tillage, husbandry, as in agriculture also the
  artificial development of microscopic organisms,
  esp. bacteria, in specially prepared media.
• The cultivating or development (of the mind,
  body, faculties, manners, etc.) improvement or
  refinement by education and training.
• The intellectual side of civilization.

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The intellectual side of civilization.

• The great men of culture are those who have had a
  passion for carrying from one end of society to
  the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of
  their time -- Matthew Arnold (1869).
• Also, the civilization, customs, artistic
  achievements, etc., of a people, esp. at a
  certain stage of its development or history.

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Everyday life

• Probably the word culture should be employed to
  define the collective and tangible outcome
  (pot-making, house-planning, tomb-building) of
  the material and spiritual traditions of a group
  of people.
• By culture is meant the whole complex of
  learned behaviour, the traditions and techniques
  and the material possessions, the language and
  other symbolism, of some body of people.

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More Definitions

• Culture or civilization taken in its wide
  ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which
  includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
  custom, and any other capabilities and habits
  acquired by man as a member of society Edward
  Tylor, 1871.
• A web of significance within a group or society,
  that is a public creation that controls and
  completes the individual Clifford Geertz, 1973.
• The code or mode of communication within a
  society that dominates, as well as the symbolic
  and political boundary between self and other
  Lamont and Fournier, 1992.
• All that humans learn Evelyn Jacob, 1992.

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The Two Cultures (Snow)

• 1959 Two Cultures Sci. Revol. Those in the two
  cultures can't talk to each other very little of
  twentieth-century science has been assimilated
  into twentieth-century art.
• 1961 The lack of communication between scientists
  and non-scientists, which has been so much
  discussed recently in terms of the two cultures.

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Technology and Culture

• Historically situated artifacts are learned as
  part of membership in communities of practice.
• Technologies are powerful webs of artifacts that
  may link thousands of communities and span highly
  complex boundaries.
• Anthropology, psychology and sociology of science
  seek to ground activities previously seen as
  individual, mental and non-social as situated,
  collective and historically specific.
• Material culture.
• People often cannot see what they take for
  granted until they encounter someone who does not
  take it for granted. Anthropologists call this
  the naturalization of categories or objects. The
  more at home you are in a community of practice,
  the more you forget the strange and contingent
  nature of its categories seen from the outside.

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• culture vulture, a rhyming collocation indicating
  a person who is voracious for culture.
• (outward seeking)
• culture-bound, restricted in character, outlook,
  etc. by belonging to a particular culture
  determined or limited by the presuppositions of
  one's culture. He is culture-bound in his
  desires as well as his activities -- R. Firth
  (1951). (inward looking)

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Architecture and Culture
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600 BC, Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar
2700-2300 BC, Great Pyramids at Giza
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448-432 BC, The Parthenon, Athens. Iktinos and
Kallikrates, architects
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1817 University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Thomas Jefferson
1796-1809 Monticello, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson
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1836-60 Houses of Parliament, LondonCharles
Barry and A.W.N. Pugin
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1889 Eiffel Tower, Paris. Gustave Eiffel
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1882-89 Forth Bridge, Edinburgh, Scotland.Sir
Benjamin Baker
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Toyko Tower
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1956-59 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York,
Frank Lloyd Wright
1937 Kaufman House Fallingwater, Bear Run, PA,
Frank Lloyd Wright
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STATA Center at MIThttp//archinect.com/gallery/t
humbnails.php?album12
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Traditional Cultures
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TRADITIONAL CULTUREKwakwaka'wakw basket fish
trap, Nahwitti area (north Vancouver Island),
c. 1900.
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JAPANESE CULTURELacquer ware
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KOTA Reliquary Figure, GabonWood, copper, and
brass
AFRICAN CULTURE Bowl with Figures Yoruba, 1925,
by Olowe of Ise, wood, pigment
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Popular culture

• popular culture n. the cultural traditions of the
  ordinary people of a particular community (now)
  esp. pop culture
• 1854 The Newspaper Press is destined to be the
  chief instrument of popular culture.
• 1966 Popular culture, which..is to be sharply
  distinguished from commercialized pop culture
  is the style of life of the majority of the
  members of a community.
• 1996 Imagine your poem being judged by that most
  ruthless arbiter of popular culture the
  clapometer.

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California is a car culture. You won't survive
for long without a car in California --
California was designed for cars...
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Or NASCAR Sub-Culture
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Sub-culture

• Sub-culture. A group or class of lesser
  importance or size sharing specific beliefs,
  interests, or values which may be at variance
  with those of the general culture of which it
  forms part.
• The total culture of a society is really an
  aggregate of sub-cultures.

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Class and Race
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Spy Culture
Digital National Security Archive 'Trial
Databases'. http//0-nsarchive.chadwyck.com.libr
ary.colby.edu/
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Dadaism ("da-da") 1920s nihilistic movement in
the arts, a reaction to the Great War,
emphasizing the absurdity of modern life, disgust
with modern civilization, complete break with
tradition, systematic destruction of culture,
surrealism, graffiti, and the complete
elimination of the meaning of words in favor of
their sounds, with comic effects through the
piling up of nonsense. Revival in 1960s, 1980s
punk and techno music movements.
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Culture and Science

• As long as our culture continues to refract
  reality through the lens of science there is an
  obligation to make the science accessible to
  everyone What is at state here is not just
  individual sanity, but ultimately social
  cohesion. By binding people into the same
  cosmological framework, a shared world picture
  becomes one of the primary glues that holds
  communities together Margaret Wertheim, 1995.
• Our intellectual work and the ways in which we
  can make a society conscious of itself are very
  much a part of that society and situated in
  institutional contexts we did not make, though we
  are working to be part of their remaking Dorothy
  Smith, 1987.
• Cultural centers museums, architectures,
  institutions.
• National Air and Space Museum we are a
  space-faring nation
• Colby Museum of Art we are a college that
  values the arts
• Creation Museum The Bible is the infallible
  guide to science