[SIGCIS-Members] teaching question: what to pair Winner's piece with?

[Luke Fernandez]

As long as we are on Winner's piece I'm wondering what complimentary
articles instructors assign when they teach "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"

In past years I've paired Winner's soft determinist account with Boas'
"Weaving The Authoritarian Web"  (
http://people.bu.edu/tboas/authoritarianweb.pdf) which presents a much less
"inherently political" picture of technology. ( I excerpt the most relevant
"technology as a tool" lines of Boas in the P.S.)  What do others typically
pair Winner with?

Sincerely,

Luke Fernandez
lfernandez.org


PS:
"China and Saudi Arabia’s experiences with the control of public Internet
use offer a common lesson about the Internet in authoritarian regimes.
Ultimately, the Internet is a tool, a medium of communication much like any
other; it has no inherent political logic, no “built-in incompatibility
[with] non-democratic rule” (Taubman 1998: 256). As a tool, its political
impacts will depend largely on who controls the medium and in what manner
they seek to use it. The Internet was initially considered an inherently
control-frustrating form of communication because of features incorporated
into the network by its designers. However, nothing in the technological
architecture of the Internet ensured that it would remain difficult to
control as it spread around the world."

PSS:

Other years I've assigned excerpts from Leo Marx's _Does Technology Drive
History?_  And this year I'm considering some excerpts from Fischer's
_America Calling_ particularly the end of chapter 8 in which he says about
the telephone:

"Our theme would be more dramatic if we could implicate the telephone in
the emergence of some aspect of psychological modernity -- rationality,
angst, anxiety, dehumanization, whatever.  The available facts, which
indicate that Americans absorbed the telephone into mundane life, seem
deflating.  But there is something yet more profound in seeing people as
active participants, assimilating a major material transformation into
their lives.  Those lives were not left unaltered to be sure, but the
alterations were largely the conscious product of people employing things,
not of things controlling people."
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