The Technological Construction of Reality PDF Download

Author: Dionysios S. Demetis
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839101199
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This visionary book delves into the world-shaping abilities of modern technology, outlining the potential future transformations that it may impose. By drawing from a range of scholarly insights, Dionysios S. Demetis and Ian O. Angell explore how technology not only influences our social, economic, political, biological and physical realities, but how it can also construct completely new ones.

Author: Christiane Floyd
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642768172
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
The present book is based on the conference Software Development and Reality Construction held at SchloB Eringerfeld in Germany, September 25 - 30, 1988. This was organized by the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) in cooperation with the German National Research Center for Computer Science (GMD), Sankt Augustin, and sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation whose financial support we gratefully acknowledge. The conference was an interdisciplinary scientific and cultural event aimed at promoting discussion on the nature of computer science as a scientific discipline and on the theoretical foundations and systemic practice required for human-oriented system design. In keeping with the conversational style of the conference, the book comprises a series of individual contributions, arranged so as to form a coherent whole. Some authors reflect on their practice in computer science and system design. Others start from approaches developed in the humanities and the social sciences for understanding human learning and creativity, individual and cooperative work, and the interrelation between technology and organizations. Thus, each contribution makes its specific point and can be read on its own merit. But, at the same time, it takes its place as a chapter in the book, along with all the other contributions, to give what seemed to us a meaningful overall line of argumentation. This required careful editorial coordination, and we are grateful to all the authors for bearing with us throughout the slow genesis of the book and for complying with our requests for extensive revision of some of the manuscripts.

Author: Hannes Werthner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030861449
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs.

Author: Peter L. Berger
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453215468
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Author: Wiebe E. Bijker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262521376
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
"The impact of technology on society is clear and unmistakeable. The influence of society on technology is more subtle. The 13 essays in this book have been written by a diverse group of scholars united by a common interest in creating a new field - the sociology of technology. They draw on a wide array of case studies - from cooking stoves to missile systems, from 15th-century Portugal to today's Al labs - to outline an original research program based on a synthesis of ideas from the social studies of science and the history of technology. Together they affirm the need for a study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions"--Back cover.

Author: Stephen W. Littlejohn
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1412959373
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1193

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Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Communication Theory provides students and researchers with a comprehensive two-volume overview of contemporary communication theory. Reference librarians report that students frequently approach them seeking a source that will provide them with a quick overview of a particular theory or theorist - just enough to help them grasp the general concept or theory and its relation to the discipline as a whole. Communication scholars and teachers also occasionally need a quick reference for theories. Edited by the co-authors of the best-selling textbook on communication theory and drawing on the expertise of an advisory board of 10 international scholars and nearly 200 contributors from 10 countries, this work finally provides such a resource. More than 300 entries address topics related not only to paradigms, traditions, and schools, but also metatheory, methodology, inquiry, and applications and contexts. Entries cover several orientations, including psycho-cognitive; social-interactional; cybernetic and systems; cultural; critical; feminist; philosophical; rhetorical; semiotic, linguistic, and discursive; and non-Western. Concepts relate to interpersonal communication, groups and organizations, and media and mass communication. In sum, this encyclopedia offers the student of communication a sense of the history, development, and current status of the discipline, with an emphasis on the theories that comprise it.

Author: Hubert Knoblauch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429775334
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This volume advocates a shift from the social constructivism found in the work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, to a communicative constructivism that acknowledges communication as an embodied form of action in its own right, according to which social actors, in engaging in communicative action, construct a material social reality that guides, delimits, and enables actions. A study of the importance of understanding the role of communication in an age in which digitization and mediatization have extended the reach of communication to a global level and brought about the emergence of the communication society, The Communicative Construction of Reality shows how communication society does not merely replace modern society and its hierarchical institutions, but complements it in a manner that continually results in conflicts leading to the refiguration of society. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in the sociology of knowledge, communication, and social theory.

Author: Antonio Sandu
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443894265
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The central focus of this volume is social constructionism in all its dimensions, including its sociological, ontological, epistemological, methodological, ethical, and pragmatic features. It pays particularly close attention to the social construction of reality as a communicative action, extending this area to include social pragmatics. It also interprets social action as a discursive-seductive strategy of exercising power in the public space, utilising a constructionist understanding, in which public space is represented by any part of the co-construction of reality through social or communicative action. In addition, at the methodological level, the book proposes a new semiotic strategy, called “fractal constructionism”, which analyses the interpretative drift of certain key concepts that are valued as social constructs.

Author: Ian O. Angell
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780932332
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book seeks to deconstruct the process of scientific knowledge discovery and theory construction by scrutinizing the circumstances under which all scientific hypotheses are conceived. It concentrates on the interrelatedness of observation, paradox, delusion and self reference in scientific theory and method.

Author: Sara Shirowzhan
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 1838801995
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book includes nine chapters presenting the outcome of research projects relevant to building, cities, and construction. A description of a smart city and the journey from conventional to smart cities is discussed at the beginning of the book. Innovative case studies of underground cities and floating city bridges are presented in this book. BIM and GIS applications on different projects, and the concept of intelligent contract and virtual reality are discussed. Two concepts relevant to conventional buildings including private open spaces and place attachments are also included, and these topics can be upgraded in the future by smart technologies.