State industries in Japan

A small paper I wrote for a university course at TU Berlin.
Here the whole paper (8 pages) and here an introduction/abstract:

The railway network is a good example of “Large technical system”, defined by the American historian of technology Thomas Hughes as a system that involves both technical objects (technologies) and social practices (techniques). The objects are rails, locomotives, raw materials, while practices are management, economic models, regulations, political decision and social uses. The two aspects affect each other.
Modern time is the age of the affirmation of organizations and nation-states, both characterized by the need to access and control key assets for the aim of self conservation and/or functioning as shown in many theories of organization. With this mindset we briefly examine the history of railroads of Japan, as a good example of the reciprocal influences played by technologies and society, especially in the policy of state-guided industry. These manufactures strongly depend on the value given by the decision makers to what a key asset is, therefore ideology plays a great role in it and sometimes is expressed as a clear political form. Meanwhile technological constraints limit and/or enhance this political visions and its expression.

Play, measure and surveillance

For Risley, fitness-tracking may have backfired, tracking something she didn’t necessarily want committed to the record.

Fitbit data just undermined a woman’s rape claim – fusion.net

Madeline

Madeline Gannon developed a project called Quipt – a gesture-based control software that gives industrial robots basic spatial behaviors for interacting closely with people.

Madeline the Robot (video)

No such thing as “technology”

“Basically anyone who views critics of particular technologies as ‘luddites’ fundamentally misunderstands what technology is. There is no such thing as ‘technology.’ Rather there are specific technologies, produced by specific economic and political actors, and deployed in specific economic and social contexts. You can be anti-nukes without being anti-antibiotics. You can be pro-surveillance of powerful institutions without being pro-surveillance of individual people. You can work on machine vision for medical applications while campaigning against the use of the same technology for automatically identifying and tracking people. How? Because you take a moral view of the likely consequences of a technology in a particular context.”

StopTheCyborgs

Bias in Technology

The picture problem

How do pictures affect our vision? A nice way to answer the question was given by Malcom Gladwell in his article “The Picture Problem”: the problem is what you see in the picture, what information you have to make sense out of it. Basic problem is that when you mount a “a four-million-dollar camera” on a plane, the picture is “nearly perfect, and there are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth.”
Therefore the “human task of interpretation is often a bigger obstacle than the technical task of picture-taking.”
A great exemplification of this problem is the work of the Photographer Tomas van Houtryve. In order to show the perception problem he flips the vision, challenging our assumptions about what we’re really looking at.
As many technology create new ways of watching, they create new posibilities for perception, but they do not really change human assumptions.
Enjoy his video of the project Blue Sky Days: https://vimeo.com/128202299

Ultimately Irresponsible

Often new technologies are faced by useless technophobic or technophiles approaches. This is basically the cornerstone of Morozov first book, re-enforcing an idea that have been around long time since Frankenstein and luddism.
A good way to avoid such drastic approaches, showing the multifaced aspects of a technology, is showing the basic human drives underlying any object. To analyze the ontologic status of the object itself is not always the best way, sometimes the history of the different objects that shared the same use is as useful. A good example can be Caillois study of games: not focusing on the toys themselves, but on the psychological attitudes that the games showed. State lottery, stock market and gambling all rely on human attitude to devolve our fate to luck or chance. Meritocratic institutions or sports, and their instruments, embody human will of putting a set of rules to ones actions in order to leave space to competition and skills. A kind of sense of fairness moves societies toward these latter forms. Caillois theory is much more complicated than that, but it shows the point.
A closer technological example can show the same. Gutenberg invention of the printed press is worldwide example of widespread mass literacy. As Scott D.N. Cook showed mass literacy actually showed up in 20th century (still not reached 100% yet), while long before 1455 literacy was more common in other societies through other medias, think of arab or jewish communities (I stick to Cook’s article, don’t know if any book proves or denies it). Pulling aside the media and their form, the basic human need was communication in different times and spaces.
Gutenberg invention linked to mass literacy is a myth, exactly as regarding internet as linked to democracy. Every technology or system of technologies can have a variety of uses, only the history of uses can tell, only by studying these we’ll know the effects of a technology.
I guess even linking Tinder to a sexually frivolous attitude is a myth.
Too far? I think not.
Actually a Slate article by Amanda Hess stays, in my mind, on this track. Not letting us drive by what we think an object is, but looking at the human uses behind it and which other technical objects had the same use even with a different purpose. People always flirted, had random sex, fooled around and made fun of each other since ages, with different technologies enabling that. This is what this article shows, basic human motives are still there crossing the physical boundaries of different media. Still we keep on linking an object to a specific social effect as if it was its only purpose.
“We developed an implicit characterization of technological revolutions that consistently results in alarmingly faulty histories and a posture toward current technologies that is frighteningly misleading and ultimately irresponsible”.