Technocriticism

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Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological change.

Technocriticism treats technological transformation as historically specific changes in personal and social practices of research, invention, appropriation, use, and discourse, rather than as an automonous or socially indifferent accumulation of useful inventions, or as an uncritical narrative of "progress" or linear "development."

Technocriticism studies these personal and social practices in both their practical and cultural significance. It documents and analyzes both their private and public uses, and often devotes special attention to the relations among these different uses and dimensions. Recurring themes in technocritical discourse include the exposure of the contingent or ideological status of the category of the "natural" in various social, cultural, or "neutral" technical discourses, as well as the questioning of the stability of standards of bodily "health" or "normality" for an always already prostheticized humanity.

Technocritical theory can be either primarily "descriptive" or "prescriptive" in tone (or it can alternate between these modes as a way of documenting relations between them). Descriptive forms of technocriticism include some scholarship in the history of technology, science and technology studies, and especially technocultural theory. More prescriptive forms of technocriticism can be found in the various branches of technoethics, for example, media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory.

Figures engaged in technocritical scholarship and theory include Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour (who work in the closely related field of science studies), N. Katherine Hayles (who works in the field of Literature and Science), Phil Agre and Mark Poster (who work in the closely related field of information studies), Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich A. Kittler (who work in the closely related field of media studies), Susan Squier and Richard Doyle (who work in the closely related field of biomedical studies), and Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault (critical theorists and philosophers who sometimes wrote about technology).

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