Humn 344 Technology and Culture

Project 1: Technology In the World – Full Description

The purpose of this assignment is to assess how a specific technology is situated in the world and determine its cultural impacts, biases and political properties. The Required Learning Materials in weeks 1, 3, and 4 serve as a foundation for this project.

This is a staged assignment in three parts. These stages are:

• Week 3: Stage 1 – Topic Selection Video
• Week 4: Stage 2 – Question Exercise
• Week 5: Stage 3 – Analysis Paper

See the specifics of each stage for instructions on what to submit in each week below. Please read through all the stages before choosing your technological artifact to make sure you can address everything the assignment requires.

Stage 1: Topic Selection Video

For stage 1, you will choose your topic and create a short 3-5 minute video to share through a cloud server in the discussion forum with your classmates. See additional tutorials in the classroom for making, uploading and sharing a video.

You will then post a short 2-3 sentence reply to 2 classmates’ proposals in the discussion forum.

Instructions

Choose a specific technological artifact (or interconnected set of artifacts) or form of technology whose impacts, biases, and political properties you can study by observing firsthand how people in the world use it. Your choice should be a primary source, some form of immediate, firsthand technology that you can observe directly. It should be original and unique, chosen from the categories below, and not be simply something like a smart phone.

Possible topic categories include:

• Technological Artifacts in the Built Environment: The built environment includes human-made structures, features, and facilities that encompass the environment where people live and work. Artifacts here would include things like a streetlight, a walkway, a road, a fence or barrier, a sidewalk, a piece of playground equipment, a building entrance, and a building elevator. For example, you could examine the streetlights at a specific busy corner where you live, an EV plug-in parking spot at a local supermarket, elevators in a building near you, an overpass on a specific street, or a specific floating dock at a riverside.
• Household Items and Tools: These would include forms of technology used in a home. Included here could be things like a vacuum cleaner, a steam mop, a tool for fixing or building things, an interior or exterior lighting system, appliances, pieces of entertainment systems. Be sure to pick a specific brand and model since all vacuums, for instance, are not designed the same way. They can be items used in your own home by your family or in the home of someone you know. Make sure you have been able to observe their actual use.
• Transportation and Infrastructure: These would include technologies people use to get around and systems that deliver specific locale services. Examples would include a specific car, truck, tractor, bus, train, airplane, a water/sewer system, a set of electrical towers, a dam, a sewage plant or system, a snowplow, a UPS truck, etc. This should be something you can see with your own eyes in its actual context where you live.

• Technology from Another Culture: This would include a technological artifact or form of technology used in a culture other than American culture or in another country. Examples would include facial recognition technology in China, high-speed rail systems in Japan, precision farming technology in South Africa, the motorcycle rickshaw in India, and speaker systems on mosques in Pakistan.
• Digital Technology: This would include specific categories of computer programs, apps, platforms, or video games. Examples would be word-processing software, shopping apps, puzzle apps, Web 2.0 social media platforms, Web 1.0 multiuser platforms (usenet, text-based mmorpgs), first-person shooter video games, building video games, military training programs, MMOs of a particular genre (adventure, first person shooter, building), graphical based MMORPGs, bitmap games.
• Workplace Technology: This would include artifacts and digital technology found in the workplace. Examples would be things like staplers, copiers, labelers, mail sorters, forensic microscopes, accounting software, medical software, medical and dental tools, learning management systems, customer management software.

Once you have chosen your topic, create a 3-5 minute video describing your artifact, why you are interested in examining it further, and some of your thoughts about why this is an appropriate topic for a class on technology and culture. In your video, please make sure to cover the following questions, and feel free to include additional thoughts as appropriate.

1. What are you planning to study?
2. Where is it located? If a digital form, where are its creators located?
3. Why is this technology interesting to you personally?
4. Why is it an appropriate choice to talk about its impacts, biases or technological politics? Please see the readings and other assignments from Week 3 to help you figure out how to talk about this questions.

Stage 2: Question Exercise

Now that you have a specific technology to examine, in this stage, you will answer a series of questions to help you start thinking about how technology functions in the world and what impacts, biases, and technological politics it may have.

Address each of the following questions in about 2-5 sentences. Be sure to refer to specific aspects or elements of your artifact and to your resources to illustrate your answers. Use at least three resources from the UMGC library. If no sources are available on the topic in the library, use other reliable resources such as trade magazines, verifiable historical information, information from the item’s website, etc. Avoid personal blogs; product reviews; promotional, marketing, or advertising materials, etc. If you have any questions about a resource, please contact your instructor.

1. Who created and designed this technology? What are the demographics of the creators? Use at least one reliable resource about inventors, designers, programmers, planners, or the company to answer this question. Also, if appropriate, consider if there is a contested history about who invented the artifact.
2. Provide a very brief history of this technology. How long has it been around? What significant changes has it gone through over the years?
3. According to your observations of this technology in its context, who uses, depends on, or interacts with this technology the most? Who uses, interacts or depends, on it the least? Who never uses, interacts with, depends on, or does not have easy access to it? Why?
4. Based on your observations of this technology in its environment, who seems to benefit from this technology the most? Who might have difficulty benefiting from it and why? What kinds of built-in biases might this technology have due to who benefits from it?
5. Briefly describe one possible change to the design, location, programming or planning of this technology that could change who uses it and/or who can benefit from it.

Format

Number your answers. For each question, write about 2-5 sentences. Make sure you address all the questions. Use MLA style for in-text citations and list your references in MLA style. Your responses should be typed, double-spaced, and use a common 12 pt. font like Times New Roman or Calibri.

Stage 3: Analysis Paper

In this paper, you will write a 1,000-1,250-word narrative that communicates your assessment of your technology’s impacts, biases, and political properties.

Your paper should do the following:

1. Introduce your technology by describing its intended use, location, and creators and their demographics.
2. Answer the question, “What invisible biases, values or norms may have been introduced into the design, planning, or intended use of this artifact by the creators or planners, and how can you determine this?”
3. Based on your observations of interactions between people and this technology, and the context of the technology (physical or digital), discuss who benefits from the technology the most and who benefits from it the least. Offer some reasons why this is the case.
4. Review pages 252-256 of Winner’s article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” from Week 3 and suggest how the technology you have chosen can create certain types of social order in our world by including and benefiting some people while excluding others. Or, you could talk about how the artifact emphasizes some values and norms over others in its design, basing your observations on Brey’s ideas from “Disclosive Computer Ethics” in Week 4, even if the technology is not digital. You can also include any sociological, anthropological studies that have been done on the technology or lawsuits that have been filed, etc., as part of your research, for example:
   • Driver side safety air bags and car seats are often designed for the average height and weight of men, thus protecting them better in crashes, and even injuring women as many experience pelvic fractures from the impact of airbags. A technology that is not designed to equally protect people of all sizes may be an ethical issue.
5. Have a concluding paragraph that sums up the conclusions you have drawn about your technology in the process of doing this project.
6. Support and explain your points with observed evidence and other research you have done. Also, be sure to use the Required Learning Materials from weeks 3-4 to help you.
7. Make sure to provide in-text citations for any paraphrases, summaries, and quotes in MLA style and provide references for all sources in MLA style. In general, avoid long quotes from your resources (more than 3 lines) and make sure to use all of your resources in your paper.

Format

Your completed paper should be 1,000-1,250 words in length and based on the work you did for stages 1-2.