Langdon Winner

Langdon Winner (born August 7, 1944) is an American political theorist, specializing in social and political issues connected with technological change in the modern age. He is the author of several books and a professor of humanities and social sciences in Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute’s department of science and technology studies. He has also been a reporter, rock music critic, and contributing editor for the magazine Rollling Stone. Quotes What do philosophers need to know about technology? I mean, of course, philosophers who want to think and write about technology in fruitful ways. What kind of knowledge do we need to have? And how much? 1993 Social constructivism: Opening the black box and finding it empty Science as Culture 3 3 427–452 10.1080/09505439309526358 (presidential address delivered to the Biennial Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, March 1991) ... the arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order. ... From the coming of the steam locomotive, to the introduction of the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, centrally generated electrical power, automobile, radio, television, nuclear power, guided missile, and the computer (to name just a few), this has been the recurring theme: celebrate! The moment of redemption is at hand. Sow's Ears from Silk Purses: The Strange Alchemy of Technological Visionaries by Langdon Winner Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies Temple University Press Philadelphia 2004 34–47 https://books.google.com/books/about/Technological_Visions.html?id=Ppr_Wui4Pd4C (quote from p. 34; edited by Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas (academic) Douglas Thomas, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach) Ethical responsibility ... involves more than leading a decent, honest, truthful life, as important as such lives certainly remain... Our moral obligations ... must include a willingness to engage others in the difficult work of defining what the crucial choices are that confront technological society and how intelligently to confront them. Winner, L. (1990), Engineering Ethics and Political Imagination, in Paul T. Durbin (ed.), Broad and Narrow Interpretations of Philosophy of Technology, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, p. 62 ... In [the] Benedictines Benedictine monasteries of medieval Europe, spiritual and working life was divided into precise units of time, the canonical hours, as a way to magnify the strength of the monks' religious devotion. This regimen gave rise to a need for devices that could measure time: hence the development of the first simple, reliable clocks. Foreword by Langdon Winner Mumford, Lewis Technics and Civilization University of Chicago Press 2010 0226550273 https://books.google.com/books?id=PU7PktesGUoC&pg=PR10 ix–xiii (quote from p. x of 2010 edition; 1st edition 1934) External links Langdon Winner's homepage Several articles by Langdon Winner at the Online Luddism Index Langdon Winner's blog Category:1944 births Category:Living people Category:Academics from the United States Category:Humanists Category:Journalists from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Philosophers from the United States Category:Political authors from the United States Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni