Results by title
67 books match the query 'Technology Studies' and 3 start with m
Marx and Digital Machines
Alienation, Technology, CapitalismMike Healy
University of Westminster Press, 2020
“Healy closes his marvellous book by saying that ‘alienation is a constant feature and is experienced as a norm rather than as an aberration’.” - https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19718_marx-and-digital-machines-alienation-technology-capitalism-by-mike-healy-reviewed-by-thomas-klikauer/
This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures.
Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism.
The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.
Mitchell Masterpieces 3
An Illustrated History of B-25 Warbirds in BusinessWim Nijenhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
After the Second World War, the B-25 got a role in civil aviation. Many airplanes were stripped of their armament and other military equipment and often came through auctions in the civilian market. They came in private hands and were deployed for transportation of personnel or goods, for training, fire fighting, agricultural spraying of other purposes. Some were converted into a luxury business plane and some were used in the film industry.
This book should serve as a general view of the companies, organisations and owners and the B-25s they flew. Moreover, the book would not be complete if no attention was paid to the civilian B-25s in the various museums and the warbird circuit. All this is described in detail and provided with about 750 pictures, many of which are in full colour.
Model Machines
A History of the Asian as AutomatonLong T. Bui
Temple University Press, 2022
In the contemporary Western imagination, Asian people are frequently described as automatons, which disavows their humanity. In Model Machines, Long Bui investigates what he calls Asian roboticism or the ways Asians embody the machine and are given robotic characteristics.
Bui offers the first historical overview of the overlapping racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their conflation with the robot-machine nexus. He puts forth the concept of the “model machine myth,” which holds specific queries about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights in the transnational making of Asian/America.
The case studies in Model Machines chart the representation of Chinese laborers, Japanese soldiers, Asian sex workers, and other examples to show how Asians are reimagined to be model machines as a product of globalization, racism, and colonialism. Moreover, it offers examples of how artists and everyday people resisted that stereotype to consider different ways of being human. Starting from the early nineteenth century, the book ends in the present with the new millennium, where the resurgence of China presages the “rise of the machines” and all the doomsday scenarios this might spell for global humanity at large.