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General News    H4'ed 8/13/15

A Dialogue with Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Thomas Farrell
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Other required reading in that course on Literacy, Technology, and Society included the following novels:

Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART (1959)

Achebe's NO LONGER AT EASE (1960)

Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE NEW PROMETHEUS (1818)

Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000-1887 (1886)

Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)

George Orwell's novel NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1948).

As I say, I am not a technophobe. But unlike certain uncritical technophiles, I readily acknowledge that technology can be criticized.

As a rule of thumb, I would urge people not to be uncritical technophiles, on the one hand, nor, on the other hand, technophobes.

On the one hand, uncritical technophiles tend to sound like mindless enthusiasts.

On the other hand, technophobes tend to indulge in catastrophizing (Ellis' term).

A BIBLIOGRAPHIC DIGRESSION

For an accessible historical survey of technology in American culture, see the impressive 1,000-page textbook INVENTING AMERICA: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 2nd ed., by Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles (2006).

Classic critiques of technology include Jacques Ellul's book THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, translated from the French by John Wilkinson (1964; French orig. ed., 1954) and E. F. Schumacher's book SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED (1973).

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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