Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
Technosociology
Technological developments are going to end up having sociopolitical ramifications of some sort, but nobody’s talking about them seriously.
Everyone has heard by now the media narrative of how Facebook and Twitter somehow caused the revolutions in the Middle East, as if people had any trouble organizing revolutions before. (One would expect Americans not to be so vulnerable to that way of thinking, but given the dismal state of American history education, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.) And most people have heard some variation of the theme that some new piece of technology is horribly mutilating the fabric of our society, but, with good reason, this sort of alarmism is almost never taken seriously.
But even though it is clear that the aforementioned ramifications exist and are most likely very large, academia refuses to seriously study them; it has instead confined itself mostly to studying small minority populations and repeating irrelevant, decades-old generalities, spewing absurd, crypto-Marxist excuses about the academic’s supposed duty to further social justice when they are questioned on their tunnel vision. As if justice were better served by ignoring large-scale changes that will surely affect everyone and instead focusing on the concerns of the small percentages of the population that are favored by the establishment.
One of my professors, an ex-mainframe programmer, told me a few months ago that studying Lasch was pointless, because he didn’t raise any new questions. I didn’t get what he meant then, but now I think I do. (Though I still think Lasch can be made relevant; social networking and the concomitant “personal brand” absurdity are surely feeding the culture of narcissism somehow.)
