Please give a substantive response to at least 100 words to three other students in regards to what they post.No plagiarism DUE DATE AND TIME: May 21, 2020 At 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time (Student) Maisie

Please give a substantive response to at least 100 words to three other students in regards to what they post.No plagiarism DUE DATE AND TIME: May 21, 2020 At 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time

(Student) Maisie lynn Mesngon Post:

Choose three sentences from the essay by Leo Marx that struck you as important for our understanding of technology and describe what they mean in relation to Marx’s argument and to your own understanding of technology in general and writing in particular.

Excerpt One

“By the time of the French and American revolutions, in other words, history itself was conceived as a record of the steady, cumulative, continuous expansion of human knowledge of – and power over – nature. Thus, the future course of history might be expected to culminate in a more or less universal improvement in the conditions of human existence.”

Excerpt Two

“There is an illusion about… [modern improvements]; there is not always a positive advance… Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

Excerpt Three

“As compared with other means of reaching our social goals, the technological has come to seem the most feasible, practical, and economically viable. It relieves the citizenry of onerous decision-making obligations and intensifies their gathering sense of political impotence.”

These excerpts from Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept by Leo Marx grabbed my attention because it not only highlighted the timeline of how technology came into play with modern society but how detrimental it can be to human existence if not used for the betterment of the society.

In excerpt one, Marx talks about how technology has already given way into the culture during the French and American Revolutions and how it can either help or hurt us. Think about the movies Armageddon (1998 sci-fi) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); both movies entail how technology is able to help and hurt the human population. In Armageddon, the main conflict was how a humongous meteorite was going to destroy planet Earth that will eventually wipe out all living things if NASA did not formulate a plan to send out astronauts and miners to bomb the meteorite at its core before it hits Earth. This is a good example that falls under the pros of technology and its field of study. On the other hand, the movie Mad Max: Fury Road depicts a futuristic post apocalypse Earth where mankind basically bombs our existence into a world that brings humans back to square one where they would become savages.

Marx then talks about how modern improvements are an illusion in the second excerpt. Take the company Apple for example. They have launched many iPhones throughout the years since June of 2007. We are in the year 2020 and they have since made twenty iPhones all which have been an upgrade from the previous one. It is a never-ending cycle of “modern improvements”.

Lastly, from my viewpoint, excerpt three discusses how in our modern day and age, we have strongly relied on technology to make decisions based on programs and blueprints we have generated throughout the years. Due to this, most companies worldwide have gone done a road where simple tasks such as packaging items for shipment by a line of workers has been replaced by a mechanical factory that eventually decreased jobs for people.

From what I gather, technology is just like any other caloric food. It does not hurt to enjoy a few pieces of chocolate. However, too much can cause a tummy ache. And to simply put, I believe that technology has a tremendous impact in society whether it be creating a new piece of equipment that helps generate a greater, more advance space hub that will eventually lead us to living on Mars or creating a world where we would live like back in the stone ages after a nuclear war.

Reference:

Marx, L. (2010, July) APA citation.Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.Retrieved from https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/stable/40927986?&seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents

Marx, Leo.Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.Published by:The John Hopkins University Pressand theSociety for the History of Technology. Jul 2010: https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.umgc.edu/stable/40927986?&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

(Student) Curtis Manos Post:

Choose three sentences from the essay by Leo Marx that struck you as important for our understanding of technology and describe what they mean in relation to Marx’s argument and to your own understanding of technology in general and writing in particular.

"This critical view of the new industrial arts marks the rise of an adversary culture that would reject the dominant faith in the advance of the mechanical arts as a sufficient, self-justifying, social goal." (Marx, 567)

In this passage, Marx is describing the counterculture attitude towards corporate-oriented technological industry that emerged in both mid-19th century and 1960's America. As capitalism grew increasingly dominant over technological progress, certain facets of American society began reacting negatively and strongly towards this prevailing cultural trend.

In the 1960's, in particular, young Americans began rejecting the idea of techno-capitalism and sought a return towards naturalistic roots, in some cases rejecting the concept of technology altogether as symbolized by rampant industrialism and consumerism. This is reflective of human's complex relationship with the idea of technology - in many ways a feat of human ingenuity, but in many ways a tool of our hubris towards the environment and each other.

"With the formation of these large, sociotechnical systems...the private family (father & sons) firm was supplanted by the anonymous, public corporation as the typical form of American business organization," (Marx, 568)

Here, Marx is detailing the growth of industrial, cultural capitalism. As American expanded rapidly in size, scale, and population, massive corporate entities began to emerge, unregulated and uninhibited, to structure and monetize the huge mechanical advancements being made. This can be seen in the advent of the railroad, which Marx uses as an example of large-scale corporatizing in reaction to technological development.

The invention of the train locomotive did not exists in a vacuum - instead, cultural frameworks were constructed to ensure the proper maintenance, care, and efficiency of the railroad system. This infrastructure changed American culture by way of inventing timezones, countless new jobs, and a corporate-industrial complex of unprecedented size. At this point in history, American culture began to integrate into the economic values of capitalism in a way that would make them extremely difficult to seperate.

"By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human - socioeconomic and political - relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purposes." (Marx, 576)

Marx outlines his general thesis in this statement - that technology is a human word for a human concept, and the cultural connection we share with technology cannot be separated from the technology itself. A smart phone, in a perfect vacuum, is simply a computer with many complex capabilities.

However, no smart phone exists in a vacuum. Smart phones are connected directly to people, and are shaped almost completely through the lens of human interaction. Social media, the internet, and communal networking are as essential to our understanding of smart phones as the technology itself. It is not only a matter of what the technologyis, but what it's used for, and why. Technology is a reflection of us, as human beings, and should be studied as an extension of ourselves - our culture, our values, our sociopolitics, and our human spirit.

Works Cited

MARX, LEO. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.”Technology and Culture, vol. 51, no. 3, 2010, pp. 561–577.JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40927986.Accessed 20 May 2020.

(Student) Joseph Thomas Post:

"The history of technology is one of those subjects that most people know more about than they realize."

This sentence by Leo Marx sets the tone of how the essay is going to flow. Whether if it’s through social interaction, newspapers, or social media, Marx states how most people know more about the history of technology than they realize. As the reader, I can completely agree with this. Before joining the Information Technology field, I had a general knowledge of IT. While going through schooling and training, most of the things I was learning I already knew about because of the experiences I had with computers. A lot of it was muscle memory and didn’t require thought which refers back to Marx’s statement.

"But how, then, are we to identify the specific changes that prompted the emergence of technology—the concept, the word, the purported thing itself? My assumption is that those changes, whatever they were, created a semantic—indeed, a conceptual—void, which is to say, an awareness of certain novel developments in society and culture for which no adequate name had yet become available."

Leo Marx explains how there wasn’t a specific event or change in history that sparked a need for a new word to describe those changes and that the need for a label created a void. As the reader, I wonder why throughout history and throughout changes was there a need for a new word or label and why did it create a void? I would assume that the terms previously used (mechanic arts, invention, machinery, i.e.) before technology described individual things and that technology would be used to describe everything as a whole.

"Thus, in addition to the crucially important engine itself, the operation of the railroad required: (1) several kinds of ancillary equipment (rolling stock, stations, yards, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, signal systems, and a huge network of tracks); (2) a corporate business organization with a large capital investment; (3) specialized forms of technical knowledge (railroad engineering, telegraphy); (4) a specially trained workforce with unique railroading skills, including civil and locomotive engineers, firemen, telegraphers, brakemen, conductors - a workforce large and resourceful enough to keep the system functioning day and night, in all kinds of weather, 365 days a year; and (5) various facilitating institutional changes, such as regulations establishing standardized track gauges and a national system of standardized time zones."

Whether if it’s small of large, every invention or machine requires countless amounts of elements in order to be complete. In this sentence, Marx goes in to detail on how much time, equipment, and manpower needed to build a railroad system. This goes back to how each process of completing railroads were labeled differently and that the word technology would be the overarching label for the railroad system. This stood out to me because with the invention of cars came freeways and highways. Living in Tampa, FL, there has been a lot of construction for a new highway that has been going on for a year or so. Just like the railroad, there has been a lot of time, equipment and manpower put in for the highway to be built. It’s nice to see how it progresses, but the traffic that comes with it is not.

MARX, LEO. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Technology and Culture, vol. 51, no. 3, 2010, pp. 561–577. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40927986. Accessed 19 May 2020.

DUE DATE AND TIME: May 21, 2020 At 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time