The Technological Society - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Technological Society write by Jacques Ellul. This book was released on 2021-07-27. The Technological Society available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book. "A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.”—Harper's “One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs.”—The Nation “A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.”—Los Angeles Free Press
Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century
Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century write by Helena M. Jerónimo. This book was released on 2013-07-08. Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume rethinks the work of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) on the centenary of his birth, by presenting an overview of the current debates based on Ellul's insights. As one of the most significant twentieth-century thinkers about technology, Ellul was among the first thinkers to realize the importance of topics such as globalization, terrorism, communication technologies and ecology, and study them from a technological perspective. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society, and addresses the reception of his work on the technological society, the notion of efficiency, the process of symbolization/de-symbolization, and ecology. The second analyzes communicational and cultural problems, as well as threats and trends in early twenty-first century societies. Many of the issues Ellul saw as crucial – such as energy, propaganda, applied life sciences and communication – continue to be so. In fact they have grown exponentially, on a global scale, producing new forms of risk. Essays in the final section examine the duality of reason and revelation. They pursue an understanding of Ellul in terms of the depth of experience and the traditions of human knowledge, which is to say, on the one hand, the experience of the human being as contained in the rationalist, sociological and philosophical traditions. On the other hand there are the transcendent roots of human existence, as well as “revealed knowledge,” in the mystical and religious traditions. The meeting of these two traditions enables us to look at Ellul’s work as a whole, but above all it opens up a space for examining religious life in the technological society.
The Empire of Non-sense
The Empire of Non-sense - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Empire of Non-sense write by Jacques Ellul. This book was released on 2014. The Empire of Non-sense available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Many modern artists and architects continue to imagine and build the world technologically. Their beliefs remain firmly rooted in their assumption that the liberating forces of technology freed them from previous artistic traditions while making available vast means of production and a plethora of materials. All artistic traditions were seemingly put aside by the paintings of Cézanne, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. Behind this apparent freedom French critic Jacques Ellul, author of the classic The Technological Society, found an absolute slavery. The artist was the handmaiden of technology, a relation the artist no longer understood, like other citizens of technological culture. Artists acclaimed their unbridled individualism while being intensely determined by the forces of technological culture. Ellul examines this process in modern art from the beginning of the 20th century where the sense of art - its meaning and embodiments - is reduced to non-sense. Ellul's study is in the tradition of Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory but moves significantly beyond their Marxist perspectives that were, from Ellul's view, co-opted by technique.
The Technological System
The Technological System - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Technological System write by Jacques Ellul. This book was released on 2018-06-11. The Technological System available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Some 20 years after writing The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul realized how the totalistic dimensions of our modern technological milieu required an additional treatment of the topic. Writing amidst the rise of books in the 1970s on pollution, over-population, and environmental degradation, Ellul found it necessary, once again, to write about the global presence of technology and its far-reaching effects. The Technological System represents a new stage in Ellul’s research. Previously he studied technological society as such; in this book he approaches the topic from a systems perspective wherein he identifies the characteristics of technological phenomena and technological progress in light of system theory. This leads to an entirely new approach to what constitutes the most important event of our society which has decisive bearing on the future of our world. Ellul’s analysis touches on all aspects of modern life, not just those of a scientific or technological order. In the end, readers are compelled to formulate their own opinions and make their own decisions regarding the way a technique-based value system affects every level of human life.
Political Machines
Political Machines - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Political Machines write by Andrew Barry. This book was released on 2001-07-23. Political Machines available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political preoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself.In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from environmental protest to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.>
