Part IV: Critical Approaches

What specific lines of inquiry inform quality contributions to the critical discourse? How are critiques sharpened through precision and focus?

Design and Form

How technologies are designed matters. What affordances do they have? How do they direct and constrain possible uses? What are they optimizing for? And what are the political and social influences they reveal? How do the design, development, and structures of technology shape its nature, uses, and impact? How can we pay attention to elements of the materiality of technology and infrastructure that are otherwise hidden or taken for granted?

• Paul Ford, “What Is Code? If You Don’t Know, You Need to Read This,” 2015²³⁷
• Paul Ford, “The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge,” 2013²³⁸
• Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Machine Zone,” 2013²³⁹
• Rusty Foster, “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls: A More Agile Healthcare.gov,” 2013²⁴⁰

Reception and Use

How people actually use technology is as important as the invention of it. What is it like to live with technologies? How are they adopted? How do people think about their own use of technology? How do users’ practices and behaviors differ from those of technologists and designers?

• David Edgerton, Shock of the Old, 2011²⁴¹
• Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother, 1983²⁴²
• Suzanne Fischer, “Why the Landline Telephone Was the Perfect Tool,” 2012²⁴³
• Eric Meyer, “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty,” 20014²⁴⁴

Ideology and Rhetoric

What are the underlying assumptions and unspoken values behind technological change? How can we critically examine a system of technological production that purports to depoliticize through objectivity? What are the principles that guide engineers and investors, and how do those principles shape the culture of technologists? How do those principles propagate in the world?

• Alexis C. Madrigal, “What’s Wrong With ‘X Is Dead,’” 2010²⁴⁵
• Mat Honan, “Please Stop Calling Gadgets Sexy,” 2011²⁴⁶ Ian Bogost, “What Is ‘Evil’ to Google?,” 2013²⁴⁷
• Molly Sauter, “In Televangelist of Technology Kevin Kelly’s Divinely-Guided The Inevitable, the Future Isn’t Quite for Everyone,” 2016²⁴⁸
• Danah boyd, “It’s Not Cyberspace Anymore.,” 2015²⁴⁹
• Virginia Heffernan, “A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute,” 2015²⁵⁰

Power, Diversity, Feminism

How are marginalized people represented in the design, development, and use of technologies? Who gets to design and build technologies? And how do systems of power perpetuate structural forms of bias? In a white, male-dominated Silicon Valley, how do critics surface intersectional concerns? What are technologies’ relationship to power structures and how are technologies employed as tools for control? How can designers better respond to and respect users’ diverse and dynamic needs?

• Helena Price, The Techies Project, 2016²⁵¹
• Joanne McNeil, “Why Do I Have to Call This App ‘Julie’?,” 2015²⁵²
• Vauhini Vara, “Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?,” 2016²⁵³
• Rose Eveleth, “How Self-Tracking Apps Exclude Women,” 2014²⁵⁴

Economics and Labor

If technologies disrupt markets, how do they do so? How does one market come to replace another? How does Silicon Valley influence the nature of work, both in building a new work culture and in supplanting traditional structures of institutional labor? What can “follow-the-money” journalism tell us about priorities and power in technological development?

• Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010²⁵⁵
• Caroline O’Donovan and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “How Much Uber Drivers Actually Make Per Hour,” 2016²⁵⁶
• Caroline O’Donovan, “2015 Was The Year Work Stopped Working,” 2015²⁵⁷
• Doug Henwood, “What the Sharing Economy Takes,” 2015²⁵⁸

Humanities, Ethics, Aesthetics

How can we read technologies as texts? All technologies are human constructions, so how can we evaluate their ethics and aesthetics as such? How do technologies extend and constrain human experience?

• Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss, 2016²⁵⁹
• Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget, 2010²⁶⁰
• Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977²⁶¹
• Whitney Mallet, “Miranda July and Paul Ford Cyberstalked Me,” 2016²⁶²
• Joanne McNeil, “Overfutured,” 2010²⁶³

Histories

Everything old is new again. What is uniquely new about new technologies? What can we learn from their predecessors? What can we learn about the trajectory of technologies by looking both at successes and failures? How can we avoid what Tom Standage calls “chronocentricity”—the egoism that your own generation is living in the cusp of history—by looking to the past?

• Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet, 1998²⁶⁴
• David E. Nye, Electrifying America, 1990²⁶⁵
• Uri Friedman “A Brief History of the Wristwatch,” 2015²⁶⁶
• Clive Thompson, “How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played,” 2015²⁶⁷