Topic

• Technoculture and risk• Name:- Sejal Chauhan• Paper:- 8 –The Cultural Studies• Roll No:- 28• M.A. Part-1 Sem-2• Year:-2013-15• Submitted to:-Smt. S.B.Gardi

Department of English M.K.Bhavnagar University.

Technology

Craftsmanship+reckoning

Techne:uncoverin

g

Tools,machines,materials

and processe

s

Technique+word

Technological determinism or

social construction?

What is technoculture?

Techno-

-Culture

Cultivation

Culture and

civilization

Issues in cultures:

Popular culturesCultural studies

Cultural differenc

esMaterial culture

CULTURE Texts Politics Images Meanings Beliefs Artefacts

Practice Professions Age Ritual Subjectivity Identity Class

Nationality Ethnicity Value Sexuality Gender Institutions

TECHNOLOGYTools Machines Materials Processes inputs Outputs

Interfaces Waste State of art Standards Techniques

Training

Technoculture and Risk

Contemporary critical theory has had to negotiate with massive environmental disaster,indutrial disaster and other cataclysmic events.

Much contemporary social theory examines the role such events play in culture.

One of the most influential of such theories is that of the risk society.

For example: -PC :- Risk+Solution

You will discover that PC gives you information on all the risks involved in using it : virus, ‘illegal operation’, repeated striking of the shift key, corruption of the hard drive and so on.

Notice that both risk and solution are embedded in the same system.

Do you see the use of technology as risky,and that same technology asks you to buy more protection to avoid risks?

Ulrich Beck propounded the influential ‘risk society’ thesis in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.

Risk, Beck inform us, is not real,risk are about ‘becoming real’.

As soon as risks become real, they cease being risks, and become, instead, disaster.

Risks then get displayed to other ‘sites’: future disasters. Thus risks are potential disasters.

We live in an increasingly technologized world.Global capitalism the immediate geopolitical context of

our nation states runs on the engines of information and communications technologies.

Our everyday life from shopping to education depends heavily on technology,with greater or lesser of both efficiency and necessity.

• Beck begins by ‘suggesting that technoscience in industrial society has generated numerous dangers.

• Industrial society is based on the production and distribution of goods which are required to fill the ‘scarcity’ within society.

• Society is based on scarcity and the removal of scarcity can handle goods and needs only when they catualize, as ‘visible’.

• Such a system can not handle the risks and hazards of industrial production and dustribution.

• But as long as risk is secondary to scarcity or needs industrial society has no problems.

• In other words, risk generates solution which generate more risk.

• Individualized beings experience newer forms of insecurity and anxieties.

• We have here culture of warnings – in banks railway coaches , malls, in fact any place you go discover warning against all sort of dangers and risks.

• Van Loon argues that this risk information is not only produced by science and governance, but also by commerce.

• Each of the above objects can be made safe, and the ‘safety’ lies in acquiring newer merchandized products.

• The very technological systems geared towards greater security and safety, instill greater risk sensibilities: we become increasingly anxious about potential threats to our health and safety precisely when we are fed information from technologies.

• The McAfee antivirus scanning software that runs with ‘hotmail’ warns us: ‘Don’t become a statistic’, and tells us exactly what could go wrong with virus infection of our PCs.

with increasing and easier access to information and the risk of releasing confidential information – ex : credit cards numbers and residential address by children via the Internet have both in creased considerably.

Such technologies engender risks while simultaneously providing solutions to such risks.

Risk thus generates commerce via a surfeit of information about risk.

Thus, when technoscience reveals the risk involved in contamination and other newer problems which were previously unknown, it also delivers information about these risks like what are the possible effects/dangers of certain objects/events such as bacteria or genetic defects.

Then it reprodused the risks by making us aware of these risks.

Thus Risk theory for Cultural Studies reveals the extent that society/ culture thrives on risk, providing information about risk potential, possible solutions and so on .

Risk theory reflects on the psycho-social impact of technoculture where cultural responses to new devices are based upon an awareness that they create new risks.

Thank you