
The essay,
“Artifact/ Ideas and Political Culture” is very questionable about how
technology is used and how it effects the world. I feel that technology
is a benefit or hasrzed. It’s all in how you use it. You would have to
ask yourself how would it be used in everyday life? Plus would it
help or hinder us by changing the economy or environment?
In the essay “Artifact/Ideas and Political Culture”, Langdon Winner proposes
a lot of issues in the society. He tells the audience about how technology
is making use laze. For example, he states that answering machines
are used because you either can not be there to pick answer the phone or
to lazy too. Also some users of the machine feel embarrassed and
it shows in their message, the record “I’m sorry I can’t be her to answer
the phone call….” Or “ I am sorry you have to talk to this machine.” It
seems that the user is apologizing for using the machine.
In another example, a woman by the name of Maevon Garrott, who worked as
a telephone operator for 18 years, was fired and was told that she was
less efficient then the average worker in process phone calls, but Garrott
noted that some times she spent her time to people who were in distress
or lonely. Like single people that get lonely or children that come
home from school and see that the house it empty. She also noted
that she was not going to hang up on them just to fit the standards of
the company. This is a good example of where technology and cultural
conflict meet.
Some more of the cultural conflict is shown in the essay. For example,
in the agricultural fields of southwestern USA, the workers would use a
hoe that they used to plow the field with, but the handle was short. This
is a form of aricfact/ideas. If the workers used the long handle hoe they
would be standing and the foreman who manages them could not tell if they
were working or just standing around, but when the handle was shorten so
that the workers would have to get down on their knees and the foreman
could see who was working and who was not.
Winner’s stated point is very strong and conclusive in the examples he
talked about in his essay. Although I feel that he was trying to
just give that reader a chance to think about, how technology is used today
and how it is effecting us in everyday life. Winner also gives us
a warning for the future of technology. In Winner’s essay he writes
”If we can not develop these skills or don care to, if we fail to confront
the world-shaping powers that new technologies present; then human freedom
and disunity could well become obsolete remnants of by some era.”