Role Of Technology In Society Research Articles

Education at the National Academies.

Education at the National Academies.

Technology change, technology transfer and ethics: Part 1

This is the first of a two part paper on technology transfer and technological innovation. The first part considers issues relating to the role of technology in society, the interrelationship between political and technological change, values biases and the role of technological and scientific expertise. The second part will consider environmental and social impacts of technology change and transfer.

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939

This collection of essays explores the ways in which intellectuals in Western nations interpreted the increasingly contradictory relationship between technology and society during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Rather than making blanket generalizations, the authors have interpreted the intellectual response to the "technology question" in specific national contexts. That this book is largely successful in demonstrating the extent to which debates on the role of technology in society were context-dependent is largely attributable to its cohesiveness and to the unusual (for an edited volume) degree to which the various essays complement one another. [End Page 595]

Technology in retail

The history of retail is also a history of the role of technology in society. A look at the evolution of retailing reveals that technology has played a role as the primary enabler of change. As technology gets more sophisticated, the consumer's expectations go up exponentially. In this age of fast food and faster lives, the power has shifted from the retailer to the consumer. The consumer is now changing faster than retail can keep up and retail is changing faster than it's infrastructure can keep up. I believe that we will see more change in the next five years than we have seen in the last 20 years. The convergence of a few key technologies is enabling that change. Examining these technologies and their relationship with retail gives us the best preview of what can happen in the next five to eight years.

Telecommunication in the Classroom: Rhetoric versus Reality

Telecommunication exchange projects are currently marketed as curriculum supplements that conveniently satisfy three key K-12 educational reform objectives: better writing skills, enhanced multicultural awareness, and better job preparation for a rapidly expanding global economy. This paper analyzes the educational discourse surrounding telecommunication exchanges, and argues that much of the current research is contradictory, inconclusive, and possibly misleading. The paper also illustrates how the often overly optimistic claims about technology-based projects are problematic in light of the larger, exceedingly complex role of technology in society.

From Constructionism to Deconstructionism: Anticipating Trends in Educational Styles

SUMMARY This paper reviews various issues concerned with the design of computer-based learning (CBL) systems and the educational philosophies from which they are derived. It considers them from the point of view of four themes of contemporary thinking: rational, pragmatic, critical and radical. In particular, the paper considers the current enthusiasm for constructionist learning and teaching methods and how these may evolve in the light of recent research. It is seen that many of the current trends in CBL system design can be related to post-modern ideas about the role of technology in society.

Technological limits and the hierarchy of product systems

The notion of technological limits and the concept of product system hierarchy are established in the fields of technology analysis and systems engineering, respectively. In this article an attempt is made to integrate these concepts. A trend toward the increased importance of quasitechnological limits relative to technological limits is described. A further trend toward the increased importance of limits on higher levels in the system hierarchy is also described, and the relationship between these two trends is explored. This leads to a hypothesis about the future role of technology in society. The possibility of integrating some of the frameworks of technology analysis is discussed. The need for technological forecasting on all levels of the system hierarchy is motivated.

Comment: The Role of Technology in Society and the Need for Historical Perspective

Comment: The Role of Technology in Society and the Need for Historical Perspective

Comment: The Role of Technology in Society and the Need for Historical Perspective

The unique contribution the historian of technology and society can hope to make is to inject a chronological dimension. Hence historians are not likely to fit well among those who see technology either as an unalloyed blessing or as an unmitigated curse. Historians have, despite a lack of firm methodological assumptions, been piling up empirical evidence that technology has been a well-recognized factor in social change not only back to the Industrial Revolution but also back at least to Olduvai Gorge and the end of the Pleistocene glaciation. However, the most unlikely conclusion they could possibly draw from this chronological sequence is the one which Mesthene attributes to them-that technology as such is not worthy of special notice. Perhaps the econometricians have rubbed out the acceleration of productivity since the 1880s and have denied a change in time period between invention and adoption of technological components in recent decades. The historian is interested in precisely those social, cultural, psychological, and political effects which render the conclusions of the econometricians elegant exercises, beautiful in their way but divorced from the choices which men and women fixed in time have always had to make. For the understanding of contemporary society, technology is worthy of such special notice that a program on technology and society cannot afford to overlook the possibility that important elements in the present interaction between technology and society took shape long before the 20th century. Even if one accepts Mesthene's proposition that the contemporary situation is qualitatively different from that of past societies, the way is still open to use the new insights our present technology and plight give us to reexamine the past with eyes better focused to understand the nature of technology in its interactions with society in any period. Two leading ideas of the present scene-the systems approach and ecological balance-have the possibility of combining to elucidate the nature of technology and innovation, but these ideas need a long time span to test themselves adequately.