WTMC workshop, 7-9 February 2007

TECHNOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY

Technology and democracy have long been intertwined. Since the Enlightenment, extending democracy and developing new technologies have been intimately associated with ideas about progress and modernity. New media technologies from the printing press to radio to the internet, have always been accompanied with great hope for their potential to provide the public with information and to improve political debate. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, there was more concern about the threat to democracy posed by the growth in the size and complexity of technological systems, rendering them beyond democratic and political control, a theme taken up by the Frankfurt School and still visible in contemporary work by Langdon Winner and Andrew Feenberg. One response to this has been a growth in experiments with public participation in scientific and technological decision making, including consensus conferences, technology assessment, etc. Another type of response is to be found in recent work by Bruno Latour and other scholars such as Andrew Barry, Annemarie Mol and Noortje Marres who have called for a return to the democratic politics of objects, first raised by American philosopher John Dewey. For these people, it is precisely the complexity and uncertainty of technology which makes it ideal for democratic debate.

In this workshop, we will focus on theoretical debates about technology and democracy and on empirical work which is concerned with the societal level. Thus, we will not focus on the debates and literature about user involvement in technological design and workplace technologies, which were the subject of the May 2006 workshop about user-producer relationships.

Confirmed speakers include: Kees Brants (Leiden/UvA), Noortje Marres (UvA/Goldsmiths), Tsjalling Swierstra (Twente), Peter-Paul Verbeek (Twente).  
A reader will be sent to all participants in early January.