Credits: 2 (on site, weather and public health permitting)

Course time(s): every other year (usually spring term)

General Education: SSC

Catalog description:

This course is designed to help students think about technology. Most of us are users of technology, but few have reflected on it sufficiently to examine it critically, its effects on our lives, our work, our environment, our consumption patterns, even our thought processes. Yet if affects every facet of our lives, and also affects the lives of people across the globe through a chain of production, consumption, and disposal. The class will focus on technology and history, culture, environment, scale, systems, change, and the future. You will learn things about technology that you never knew you didn’t know.

Prerequisites: None, but preferably junior-level standing.

Course website: https://noegret.org/soc-371-technology-society

Most recent  syllabi: W’21 (online); W’19 (Portland)

Textbooks used:

• Readings consist of a variety of articles and book chapters from the relevant literature on technology and social science.

General topics covered: history of technology, diffusion/spread, cultural embeddedness of technology, sociotechnical systems, appropriate technology, politics, smart phone use and mindfulness, etc.

Course objectives

1. Develop critical thinking skills around technology and related issues;
2. Examine ‘systems’ of technology and how they combine social, cultural, political and organizational elements (referred to as ‘sociotechnical systems’);
3. Understand how innovation and diffusion or spread of technology can impact other cultures, and how technologies often embody values of the cultures from which they came;
4. Examine how different technologies, sometimes serving the same functions, can have different impacts on the environment and on carbon ‘footprints.’
5. Reflect on digital technologies (especially the ‘smart’ phone), and apply your learning to better understand longer-term impacts and trajectories of change.

The general education curriculum assumes that ‘every educated person should have some acquaintance with certain traditional areas of human knowledge and experience and be able to synthesize and contextualize this knowledge within their own lives.’ This course examines two important concepts: technology and society. Students will be asked to critically examine their own relationships to technology, and how technology shapes human lives and social organization. To paraphrase–we seek to acquaint the fish with the water in a mindful way. This course fulfills the Social Science (SSC) gen-ed requirement.

Upon completion of the course, you should have a much better understanding of how humans shape technology development, and how technology shapes humans’ lives, and how the already-ubiquitous hand-held computer (aka smart phone) merits critical attention from the social sciences.