Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Do artifacts have politics with reference of music players

All man made things are for reducing efforts and increasing efficiency. Different people have different perspective by which they see things around us. Artifacts are to help us.It means they make something easy,means increases power .Here the politics issue comes. Owner or having rights of using some artifacts have more power than a common person. The ordinary have a feeling that he is being in a lower state.

Some people who have enough rights or from high society they think that artifacts are neutral to society. They think that artifacts have nothing to do with politics.For them artifacts are to help community. science makes best guarantees of freedom,the factory system,automobile,telephone,radio,television,space program, fertiliser.The machine have the occasion for reshaping of social relationships involved in production in rural. And humans are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to technical means. With this view we see an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other deeply that bear political and economic power. The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity.

Technical arrangements creates social order, and concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This lead to inbalance between social groups. For an example when in india first railway service started the indian were treated like dirt. British government made the rules that only britain residents can travel in high class compartments other will be in third class.There are other examples also.This way the simple categories of ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ altogether, representing in which the process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others.Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of arrangements with explicit or implicit political purposes. Like different pathways for servents and owner.

Let me take ipod ,these created such a effect that made it so much famous among people. but it has also created partitions between them. those who listen western music or follow foreign culture are considered as higher status than who like to play normal songs. Those who don’t use ipod are to be considered at a lower understanding state.

Now coming to the point of politics the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a political issues . Technological politics draws attention to large socieotechnical systems to the response of modern societies to certain technological artfacts.Technologies are relatively flexible in design and arrangement and variable in their effects. Although we can recognize a particular result produced in a particular setting of an artifact, we can also easily imagine how a similar device or system might have been built or situated with very much different political consequences to reduce partitions among people.

There are countless ways in which machines, instruments, and structures of common use–buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth–made it impossible for many low class persons to leave freely. The adoption of a given technical system actually requires the creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system like particular culture. it become evident that justice requires remedy. A whole range of artifacts should be redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate minority.So this is how artifacts do have politics.


References
1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ langdon winner
2)Which politics for which artifacts? By Bruno latour
3)http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/category/do-artifacts-have-politics

praveen
na09b019

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