Technology and Society: Assignment on the Politics of a Technology

In his essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner examined a number of ways in which a technology might embody political intentions, have political consequences, or even require a particular social system in order to function. He mobilized a number of examples, from Robert Moses’ overpasses to ships to mechanical tomato harvesters.

Your assignment is to pick a technology that interests you, either historical or contemporary, and write an essay arguing either that it has politics in some particular way or that it does not. Your essay should present your original analysis of this technology, but also demonstrate how other accounts—whether technical, journalistic, sociological, historical, etc.—have informed your analysis. We’ll talk in class on September 16 about where you might find such sources, so please come with an idea of what technology you’d like to write about.

Writing about technology often draws on the author’s experience of the technology itself. You’re welcome (but not required) to use your personal experience as a source in your essay, and—unlike in some other genres of academic writing—you can also absolutely use the word “I” in your essays for this course.

I’ll also expect you to refer to Winner’s analysis in some way, perhaps by explaining how the technology you’re writing about fits into his categories of political technologies, or drawing an analogy between it and one of the technologies he analyzes. You might also find helpful a list of “76 Reasonable Questions to Ask About Any Technology” by the sociologist Jacques Ellul, one of the thinkers who influenced Winner. I don’t think it would be possible to address all 76 of these questions in your short essay, but you might find that two or three of them help you think about your technology.

Your essay should be five pages long, plus or minus a page. You should cite your sources, but you don’t have to use any particular citation style as long as you’re consistent throughout the paper. You’re welcome to use Wikipedia and other casual online sources as starting places to find more formal sources (journal articles, books, museum and academic websites, etc.), but please do not treat Wikipedia itself as an authority.

Finally, some notes regarding what sort of technology you might choose to write about:

• You are welcome to pick a technology that we've read about, either in Winner’s essay or in the other reading for class. In this case, I’ll expect you to briefly summarize the argument of whomever we read on this technology, but devote most of your essay to your own analysis. Your own analysis might respond to the analysis we read, particularly if you argue that it’s wrong.
• You’re also welcome to pick a technology that we’ll cover later in the semester. In this case, I expect you to do that reading now so it can inform your essay.
• Or you may pick a technology we won’t be covering. I’d be happy to help you think about what you might read to better understand your technology, or people’s experiences of it, and we’ll spend some time talking about this in class on September 16.
• If you write about something that’s on the edge of the category of technology—a process, an organism, or a beaver dam, for example—you might need to spend some of your essay arguing that it is a technology in order to make the case that it even makes sense to analyze it in Winner’s terms.
• You may write about software if you like, but you must also incorporate the hardware on which it runs into your analysis. Writing about software is hard, and you’ll probably find closer analogies to the technologies of the past if you take a more holistic approach.

A draft is due on September 23, I’ll give it back to you with comments on September 30, and the final version of the paper is due on October 7. Please let me know if you have any questions about this assignment.