Future Hype
Future Hype

Author: Bob Seidensticker

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2006-04-09

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1609943473

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This fascinating look at innovations past and present—and our sometimes mistaken beliefs about them—“puts technological change into historical perspective” (Henry Petroski, author of The Evolution of Useful Things). Everyone knows that today’s rate of technological change is unprecedented. With breakthroughs from the Internet to cell phones to digital music and pictures, everyone knows that the social impact of technology has never been as profound or overwhelming. But how much is truth and how much is hype? Future Hype surveys the past few hundred years to show that many of the technologies we now take for granted transformed society in far more dramatic ways than more recent developments so often touted as unparalleled and historic. In this thoughtful book, Bob Seidensticker exposes the hidden costs of technology—and helps both consumers and businesses take a shrewder position when the next “essential” innovation is trotted out.

Futurehype
Futurehype

Author: Bob Seidensticker

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2009-02-18

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1442963115

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Most people feel certain that the pace of technological change increases exponentially. They think that the Internet and personal computers are only the most prominent of the many innovations that surge around us and that new ones arrive ever faster. They're certain that never before has the social impact of technological change been as profound or as pervasive as it is today. But they are wrong. The Internet isn't that big a deal. Neither is the PC. Abandon all technology and live in the woods for a week and see if it's your laptop you miss most. In fact, the technologies most important to us are the older ones - the car and telephone, electricity and concrete, textiles and agriculture, to name just a few. The popular perception of modern technology is inflated and out of step with reality. We overestimate the importance of new and exciting inventions, and we underestimate those we've grown up with. Change is not increasing exponentially. In fact, technology has disoriented and delighted for centuries. This book will attempt to recalibrate your thinking by looking at how technological change really happens....If people see technology more clearly, we would have a shrewder citizenry that would demand practical and constructive, rather than expedient or convenient, decisions from their politicians. They would be more able to analyze and discuss the relevant technology issues of the day - from the digital divide, to government support for space and other science programs, to national defense, to the value of computers in schools - and weigh more knowledgeably the pros and cons of what is being offered....Over three decades ago, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler created a sensation by portraying technology spinning out of society's control. Future Hype approaches the same topic but reaches a very different conclusion: that the popular view of technological change is wrong and the future won't be so shocking. We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Future Hype
Future Hype

Author: Robert B. Seidensticker

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1442963077

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Socio-Technical Futures Shaping the Present
Socio-Technical Futures Shaping the Present

Author: Andreas Lösch

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 3658271558

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​The exploration of ways to conceptualize the shaping of the present by socio‐technical futures is the aim of this volume. Therefore it brings together contributions from Science and Technology Studies and Technology Assessment, which focus all on the question how socio-technical images of the future shape present processes of innovation and transformation starting from empirical case studies and generalizing specific findings or by tackling conceptual questions from the outset. A white paper of 23 authors, which aims to sensitize researchers and practitioners completes the volume.

Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future
Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future

Author: Sarah Pink

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-14

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 100064362X

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Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future invites us to think forward from our present moment of planetary, public and everyday crisis, through the prism of emerging technologies. It calls for a new ethical, responsible and equitable path towards possible futures, curated through in-depth engagement with and across experiential, environmental and technological possibilities. It tackles three of the most significant challenges for contemporary society by asking: how emerging technologies are implicated in the sites of everyday lives; what place emerging technologies have in an evolving world in crisis; and how we might better imagine and shape ethical, equitable and responsible futures. The book interweaves three narratives, each of which advances three sets of concerns for our societal futures: ‘Emergence’, which addresses futures, trust and hope; ‘Worlds’, which addresses data, air and energy; and ‘Technologies’, which addresses the future of mobilities, homes and work. Not simply a critical study of emerging technologies, this book is also an approach to thinking and practice in times of global crisis that plays out a mode of future-focused scholarship and action for the first half of the twenty-first century.

The Future of Human Rights
The Future of Human Rights

Author: Upendra Baxi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-12-12

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 019908789X

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This book critically examines the contemporary discourses on the nature of 'human rights', their histories, the myths that are embedded in them, and contributes an alternative reading of those histories by placing the concerns and interests of the 'people in struggle and communities of resistance' at centre stage. The work analyses the significance of the United Nations (UN) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and goes on to study the more contemporary issues such as women's struggle to feminize the understanding and practice of human rights, the postmodernist critique of the universal idiom of human rights and, most pertinently for the current world scene, it analyses the impact of globalization on the human rights movement. The volume includes a discussion on the proposed UN norms regarding the human rights responsibilities of multinational corporations and other business entities.

Snap to Grid
Snap to Grid

Author: Peter Lunenfeld

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780262621588

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A vibrant guide to the artistic, cultural, and social faces of the new media.

Visions of Energy Futures
Visions of Energy Futures

Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0429633998

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This book examines the visions, fantasies, frames, discourses, imaginaries, and expectations associated with six state-of-the-art energy systems—nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, shale gas, clean coal, smart meters, and electric vehicles—playing a key role in current deliberations about low-carbon energy supply and use. Visions of Energy Futures: Imagining and Innovating Low-Carbon Transitions unveils what the future of energy systems could look like, and how their meanings are produced, often alongside moments of contestation. Theoretically, it analyzes these technological case studies with emerging concepts from various disciplines: utopianism (history of technology), symbolic convergence (communication studies), technological frames (social construction of technology), discursive coalitions (discourse analysis and linguistics), sociotechnical imaginaries (science and technology studies), and the sociology of expectations (innovation studies, future studies). It draws from these cases to create a synthetic set of dichotomies and frameworks for energy futures based on original data collected across two global epistemic communities— nuclear physicists and hydrogen engineers—and experts in Eastern Europe and the Nordic region, stakeholders in South Africa, and newspapers in the United Kingdom. This book is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems and practices is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that success will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics. The discursive creation of the energy systems of tomorrow are propagated in polity, hoping to be realized as the material fact of the future, but processed in conflicting ways with underlying tensions as to how contemporary societies ought to be ordered. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of energy policy, energy and environment, and technology assessment.

Futures Beyond Dystopia
Futures Beyond Dystopia

Author: Richard Slaughter

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780415302708

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How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? This book raises and tackles a number of important questions about the future and the lessons we can learn for the present.