Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 224 pages
- Published by: University of Georgia Press October 20, 2000
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 082032230X
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0820322308
-
Book Dimensions:
8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 10.6 ounces
From Booklist
Not so fast, says Bowers, who believes that the media's infatuation with computers has blinded us to their negative effect on world cultures and the environment. An educator and author of The Culture of Denial (1997), Bowers asks readers to tune out the hype and focus on the motivations behind and consequences of the spread of computer technology, which he equates with nineteenth-century colonialism. Computers are a product of the Industrial Revolution's mindset, the belief that defines "humans as the dominant species and Nature as an economic resource." This distorted perspective, coupled with the push to computerize every aspect of life, has led to environmental degradation, cultural homogenization, and economic inequities that are now giving globalization a terrible name. To compound the problem, our educational system does little to challenge assumptions that value the marketplace and technology more than communities and ecological well-being. Academic in tone but humanistic in content, Bowers' probing and nuanced critique provides a much-needed catalyst for serious debate about the state of the planet now and in the near future.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Book Description
Do computers foster cultural diversity? Ecological sustainability? In our age of high-tech euphoria we seem content to leave tough questions like these to the experts. That dangerous inclination is at the heart of this important examination of the commercial and educational trends that have left us so uncritically optimistic about global computing.
Contrary to the attitudes that have been marketed and taught to us, says C. A. Bowers, the fact is that computers operate on a set of Western cultural assumptions and a market economy that drives consumption. Our indoctrination includes the view of global computing innovations as inevitable and on a par with social progress--a perspective dismayingly suggestive of the mindset that engendered the vast cultural and ecological disruptions of the industrial revolution and world colonialism.
In
Let Them Eat Data Bowers discusses important issues that have fallen into the gap between our perceptions and the realities of global computing, including the misuse of the theory of evolution to justify and legitimate the global spread of computers, and the ecological and cultural implications of unmoving knowledge from its local contexts as it is digitized, commodified, and packaged for global consumption. He also suggests ways that educators can help us think more critically about technology.
Let Them Eat Data is essential reading if we are to begin democratizing technological decisions, conserving true cultural diversity and intergenerational forms of knowledge, and living within the limits and possibilities of the earth's natural systems.
Reader ReviewsBowers' work is an excellent argument for careful reconsideration of "pushing" computing tools as a panacea. I was especially struck by hi intimation that technology is like a drug that causes addiction. Books of this type should be required reading for a variety of policymakers, and this particular book makes the issue of 'tech addiction" easy to understand.
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