Chapter Summary
In this chapter, Langdon Winner discusses what he calls “technological somnambulism.” Our capacity and willingness to reflect on the significance of technology and to critically evaluate new technologies lags far behind our capacity for creating and disseminating technologies. As a result, we “willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.” Winner suggests several reasons for this somnambulism, including beliefs about the neutrality of technology and technological determinism. He is critical of each of these. Winner is also critical of the near exclusive focus of technological assessment on the positive and negative impacts or effects of a technology. Technologies certainly have impacts, but they also can restructure our physical and social worlds, and so how we live. Winner argues that this understanding of technologies as “forms of life” needs to inform our evaluations and choices regarding technological innovation and adoption.
This chapter is excerpted from Langdon Winner (1983) ‘Technologies as Forms of Life,’ in Epistemology, Methodology and the Social Sciences, eds. Cohen and Wartofsky (Kluwer Academic Publishers). It appears here by permission of Springer Press.
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© 2014 Langdon Winner
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Winner, L. (2014). Technologies as Forms of Life. In: Sandler, R.L. (eds) Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349088_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349088_4
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