Sustainable technological citizenship

Abstract

As technology has the ability to displace power and politics, it needs to be at the centre of political concern. This article develops the idea that technological citizenship is an important concept in cultivating political sensitivity to technology. Rather than straightforwardly correcting for the displacement of power, technological citizenship must cultivate this displacement and engage with it through contestation. Drawing on insights from the critical theory of technology, this article reconceptualizes the political effects of technology as internal to both politics and technology design, rather than externalities. By recontextualizing, the critical theory aims to reshape the input space of technology design, and include a broader range of values. This conflation of the political and the technical shows remarkable parallels with the generic concept of sustainability. It is thus concluded that technological citizenship is essentially sustainable citizenship.

Keywords

critical theory of technology democratization displacement sustainability technological citizenship

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Agar

(2004) Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Bijker

(1995) Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bijker

(1996) Democratization of Technology: Who Are the Experts? http://www.angelfire.com/la/esst/bijker.html (accessed: 7 June 2011).

Bijker

(2004) Sustainable policy? A public debate about nature development in the Netherlands. History and Technology: An International Journal 20(4): 371–92.

Bovens

(2002) Information rights: citizenship in the information society. The Journal of Political Philosophy 10(3): 317–41.

Brown

(2009) Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

Brundtland

(1987) Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. Geneva: UN World Commission on Environment and Development.

Bude

Dürrschmidt

(2010) What’s wrong with globalization?: Contra ‘flow speak’ – towards an existential turn in the theory of globalization. European Journal of Social Theory 13(4): 481–500.

Callon

Lascoumes

Barthe

(2009) Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

10.

Castells

(2000) The Rise of the Network Society. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

11.

Castells

(2004) The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

12.

Collins

Evans

(2002) The third wave of science studies. Social Studies of Science 32(2): 235–96.

13.

Crick

(2004) Politics as a form of rule: politics, citizenship and democracy. In: Leftwich

(ed.), What Is Politics? Cambridge: Polity Press.

14.

Dagger

(2002) Republican citizenship. In: Isin

Turner

(eds) The Handbook of Citizenship Studies. London: Sage.

15.

De Vries

(2007) What is political in sub-politics?: How Aristotle might help STS. Social Studies of Science 37(5): 781–809.

16.

Elam

Bertilsson

(2003) Consuming, engaging and confronting science. European Journal of Social Theory 6(2): 233–51.

17.

Feenberg

(1995) Alternative Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

18.

Feenberg

(2002) Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press.

19.

Feenberg

(2005) Critical theory of technology: an overview. Tailoring Biotechnologies 1(1): 47–64.

20.

Frankenfeld

(1992) Technological citizenship: a normative framework for risk. Science, Technology, & Human Values 17(4): 459–84.

21.

Fung

(2003) Survey article: recipes for public spheres: Eight institutional design choices and their consequences. Journal of Political Philosophy 11(3): 338–67.

22.

Goeminne

(2010) Climate policy is dead, long live climate politics! Ethics, Place & Environment 13(2): 207–14.

23.

Goeminne

Paredis

(2010) The concept of ecological debt: some steps towards an enriched sustainability paradigm. Environment, Development and Sustainability 12(5): 691–712.

24.

Gosseries

(2008) On future generations' future rights. Journal of Political Philosophy 16(4): 446–74.

25.

Gutmann

Thompson

(2004) Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

26.

Habermas

(1996) Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: Polity Press.

27.

Harbers

(1996) Politiek van de technologie. Kennis en Methode 20(3): 308–15.

28.

Horkheimer

Adorno

(1944) Dialekitik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. New York: Social Studies Association.

29.

Irwin

(2006) The politics of talk. Social Studies of Science 36(2): 299–320.

30.

Jasanoff

(2003) Breaking the waves in science studies: comment on H.M. Collins and Robert Evans, ‘The third wave of science studies’. Social Studies of Science 33(3): 389–400.

31.

Lash

(2002) Critique of Information. London: Sage.

32.

Latour

(1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

33.

Latour

(1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

34.

Leydet

(2009) Citizenship. In: Zalta

(ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

35.

Marres

(2005) No Issue, No Public. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.

36.

Marres

(2007) The issues deserve more credit: pragmatist contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy. Social Studies of Science 37(5): 759–80.

37.

Marres

(2009) Testing powers of engagement. European Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 117–33.

38.

Martens

(2006) Sustainability: science or fiction? Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 2(1): 36–41.

39.

McGee

(1980) The ‘Ideograph’: a link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly Journal of Speech 66(1): 1–16.

40.

Mitcham

(1997) Thinking Ethics in Technology: Hennebach Lectures and Papers, 1995–1996. Colorado: Div. of Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines.

41.

Mouffe

(2005) On the Political. London: Routledge.

42.

Nahuis

Lente

(2008) Where are the politics? Perspectives on democracy and technology. Science, Technology, & Human Values 33(5): 559–81.

43.

Rawls

(1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

44.

Schot

Rip

(1996) The past and future of constructive technology assessment. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 54: 251–68.

45.

Sclove

(1995) Democracy and Technology. New York: Guilford Press.

46.

Smith

(2007) Cosmopolitan citizenship: virtue, irony and worldliness. European Journal of Social Theory 10(1): 37–52.

47.

Stevenson

(2006) Technological citizenship: perspectives in the recent work of Manuel Castells and Paul Virilio. Sociological Research Online 10(3).

48.

Strijbos

(2001) Global citizenship and the real world of technology. Technology in Society 23(4): 525–33.

49.

Thomas

(2002) Who belongs? European Journal of Social Theory 5(3): 323–49.

50.

Valkenburg

(2009) Politics by All Means: An Enquiry into Technological Liberalism. Enschede: University of Twente/3TU, Center for Ethics and Technology.

51.

Vanderheiden

(2008) Two conceptions of sustainability. Political Studies 56(2): 435–55.

52.

Virilio

(2005) The Information Bomb. London: Verso Books.

53.

Winner

(1988) The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

54.

Wynne

(2002) Risk and environment as legitimatory discourses of technology: reflexivity inside out? Current Sociology 50(3): 459–77.