Lecture 11 Essay Presentations and Feedback

For the final session on Friday December 12th there is no set reading as such, instead as you should come with a short presentation outlining your ideas for the essay including a question you would like to ask the whole group to secure ideas for your work.

You should prepare your talk in the light of some of the larger questions running through the module:

- How does your topic relate to the history of technology? See for example the ‘grand sweep’ works of Siegfried Giedion and Lewis Mumford mentioned at the start of the module.

- How does your topic relate to the question of materiality? What kind of material ‘stuff’ makes up your object/thing/process? See the work of Daniel Miller on material culture.

- How does your topic relate to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan: that media are extensions of human capabilities, and that the medium of communication is the message?

- How does your topic relate to the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and some of the ideas outlined in the Routledge Handbook of Mobilities?

As explained in the module outline, you have the option to submit a one page outline of your essay (maximum 250 words) by E-mail before 12.00 Monday 8th December. Feedback will be given back early on in the session on Friday December 12th.

Only those who attend in person on Friday 12th will receive feedback on Friday 12th. No one will receive feedback before Friday 12th on submitted essay outlines. Essay outlines submitted after 12.00 on Monday December 8th will not receive formal feedback.

Lecture 10 Travelling

The lecture on 5th December will focus on travelling, framed through the exploration of mobilities.

The suggested reading for the session is a key intervention by Sheller and Urry, linked to via Moodle:

Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) “The new mobilities paradigm”, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 207-226.

In this article they argue that the analysis of human life needs to be fundamentally re-oriented to recognise the profound significance of mobilities to a whole range of social, economic and cultural processes.

The theme of mobilities has spawned a wide range of literature, taking the analysis of mobilities well beyond its former disciplinary home of transport geographies. The richest source of material is the recent Routledge Handbook of Mobilities.

Among the issues in the literature are reflections on how mobility infrastructures often only become visible when they fail, see e.g. work on the ‘ash cloud’ of a few years ago in a special issue of the journal Mobilities on the disruption caused by the Icelandic ash cloud in 2010.

An excellent example of what might be termed a mobile material analysis is this analysis of the making of flip-flops:

Knowles, C. (2014) Flip Flop: a journey through globalisation's back roads, London: Pluto Press

For the seminar you should consider the mobilities literature and come with some thoughts to share with the group on the extent to which the subject of your essay relates to the themes raised in the new mobilities paradigm.

Preparing for the essay

As indicated in the module reading list, you have the option to submit a one page (200-250 word) outline of your essay by E-mail to me before Monday December 8th at 12 noon. The feedback will be given back to you in the final session of the module on Friday December 12th.

Lecture 9 Communicating

The lecture on November 28th will explore the practices of communication and some of the associated technologies and devices. As background to the session among the resources to explore are:

For data on global communication the International Telecommunications Union 2014 Report The World in 2014 ICT Facts and Figures.

For sociological commentary on some of these trends see:

Baym, N. (2010) Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity Press

De Sousa e Silva, A. and Frith, J. (2012) Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Abingdon: Routledge

Ling, R. and Donner, J. (2009) Mobile Communication, Cambridge: Polity Press

On the theme of the emotional consequences of mobile communucication, as well as Licoppe’s article on connected presence.

For mobile media and smartphones, specifically the iPhone, as well as the reading by Ash and Wilson, linked to on Moodle, see:

Hjorth, L., Burgess, J. and Richardson, I. (2012) Studying mobile media: cultural technologies, mobile communication, and the iPhone, Abingdon: Routledge

Madianou, M. (2014) “Smartphones as Polymedia”, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 667-680

Mihailidis, P. (2014) “A tethered generation: Exploring the role of mobile phones in the daily life of young people”, Mobile Media and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 58-72

Miller, J. (2014) “The fourth screen: Mediatization and the smartphone”, Mobile Media and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 209-226

On Google Glass, see Google’s own promotional material.
Would you wear them?

On wearable technologies, many such devices were demonstrated at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2014, for example Razer’s Nabu Smart Band.

On the internet of things, or as they put it here the internet of everything, see this presentation by Cisco, one of the leading corporations promoting these technologies.

Follow the Thing: Textiles (by Rebekah Sanders)

Last Friday as part of the module we were lucky enough to visit the beautiful village of Slaithwaite (or "Slawit" as it's known to the locals) near Huddersfield in Yorkshire for a fabulous day of exploring the processes behind some of the textile production for which the area is world-famous.

Our first stop of the day was the Spectrum Yarns Spinning Mill. The manager described how yarn gets from a sheep to being usable yarn: it gets shorn off the sheep, sorted by quality, washed, and then carded before being spun into yarn. Australian wool is more likely to be used for wearable textiles than British wool – British wool is coarser, due to the sheep spending most of their time outdoors in the cold and rain, and so is more likely to be used for carpets and bus seat covers.

In the factory their work begins after the carding process, which is where all the wool gets combed to get all the fibres in line with each other. This means that the factory’s raw material is balls of combed wool, all wound up like giant skeins of yarn. There were containers FULL of balls like this – It was amazing to think of all the potential yarn that could be made from it!

There were all sorts of interesting machines, like this one that takes all the "neps" or impurities out of the combed wool. You can see here that it is blue – that is because the wool has been dyed before spinning to keep the colour even, although dye can be added later in the spinning process as well.

Elsewhere were spinning machines all working simultaneously to create the plies later to be twisted into yarn...

Our next stop was the Very English Weaving Company, so we could see how the yarn was then put to use in fabric production

Seeing behind the scenes here felt like stepping back in time – there were traditional materials and traditional machines...

Although this newer machine for creating the warp (the threads that run vertically on a garment) was quite impressive!

The weaving machines themselves were complicated - it obviously takes a very skilled worker. We were told that the people working the machines have to be a machine technician, and a weaver, as well as having other skills necessary for the job.

We could see some works in progress while we were there – the colour combinations on some of the looms were stunning:

When designing they make use of colour cards which help them select which colours they may want to combine. This also allows for customers to ask for custom orders and combinations.

It was so nice to see such wonderful work being made in the UK - it is called the Very English Weaving Company for a reason!

The last stages in the fabric process (fabric ready for garments) were discovered when we visited McNair Shirts - a producer of luxury skiing and snowboarding shirts in Slaithwaite, with many of their materials being sourced within the village. We were able to see some of the prototype shirts, and how they have developed the design over time. Each shirt has a little bit about the company written in them...

What was really interesting was hearing the design process that went into the shirts, and about the materials that they are made of. Here is a before and after picture of what the fabric looks like to start with (on the left) and after felting (on the right)... This is what creates their unique fabric.

Our very last stop of the day was to visit Schofield and Smith.. It was dressmaker's heaven, with bolts and bolts of fabric on the shelves ready for despatch to be fashioned into garments by bespoke tailors around Britain, and all over the world.

My last photo is this one - which is simply of a few bolts of fabric, which summed up all the processes I saw during the day. I had seen where the yarn that went into it came from, I had seen how it was made, and there it was, sitting on the shelf, looking very pretty. It was really cool to be able to see those few bolts of fabric, knowing exactly where they came from, and I know it will definitely make me think more about where other things around me come from in the future.

(We are extremely grateful to Chris Sykes of Schofield and Smith for hosting our visit).

Lecture 8 Recording

The lecture on 21st November will reflect on the dramatic changes in the ways in which societies are recording and remembering events, things, words and images.

A practical focus for the issues raised by the lecture is the recent opening of Europe’s largest public lending library, the Library of Birmingham.
In an increasingly digital information context, does it make sense to invest in a building housing physical books?

For further reflections on the contemporary meanings of archives see:
Featherstone, M. (2000) “Archiving Cultures”, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 161-184

You should also reflect on your own experiences of both accessing and perhaps increasingly producing information. To what extent do you document and store aspects of your life? Has the balance between physical and digital items changed as you’ve grown older? Do you prefer studying through screens or with pen and paper?

For reflections on digital self-archiving see:
Good, K. (2013) “From scrapbook to Facebook: A history of personal media assemblage and archives”, New Media and Society, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 557-573 and
Keightley, E. and Pickering, M. (2014) "Technologies of memory: Practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography", New Media and Society, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 576-593.

Beyond the realms of education and self-archiving what are the implications of digital payments systems such as Bitcoin and Apple Pay?

For a case study of mobile payment systems see:
Maurer, B. (2012) “Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space”, Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 48, No.5, pp. 489-504

The implications of digitisation have been acutely felt in the realm of recorded music. There is a burgeoning field of ‘sound studies’ documented in

Sterne, J. (Ed.) (2012) The Sounds Reader, Abingdon: Routledge
And Sterne has produced a fascinating history of the MP3 format:
Sterne, J. (2012) MP3: the meaning of a format, Durham: Duke University Press
Pre-figured in a 2006 paper you can download directly from Sterne's site.
Sterne, J. (2006) “The MP3 as cultural artefact”, New Media and Society, Vol. 8, No. 5, pp. 825-842

Underlying many of these developments in recording technology is the infrastructure of software, and there is an emerging field of software studies which may challenge the notion that digitisation means dematerialisation.
Several of these works are (appropriately enough) available as E-books via the Library catalogue, for example:
Chun, W. (2011) Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Electronic Readling List

In a practical move that raises many of the issues to be explored in the lecture, via the module's Moodle page if you scroll down on the right hand side in the resources block you should find a link to an online version of the reading list with 'real time' links to the Library catalogue.

Finally, on 3-D printing see:
Birtchnell, T. and Urry, J. (2013) “Fabricating Futures and the Movement of Objects”, Mobilities, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 388-405

Session 7 Visit to Slaithwaite, Yorkshire

Following on from the visit to the Design Museum and the lecture on fashion, and ahead of next week's visit to fabric producers in Slaithwaite, Yorkshire; whether or not you are coming on the visit you would benefit from reflecting more deeply on textiles, fabrics, and the part they play in your lives.

Among the books and artices to explore are:

Gordon, B. (2013) Textiles: the whole story, London: Thames and Hudson

Hemmings, J. (Ed.) (2012) The Textile Reader, Oxford: Berg

Ingold, T. (2010) "The textility of making", Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 91-102

Lecture 6 Clothing

The next lecture on the module will be on Friday November 7th, about clothing, so it follows on from the Design Museum Exhibition on Women, Fashion, Power; and links to the 14th November visit to the cloth makers in Yorkshire.
Among the questions to consider are:

- should sociologists be interested in fashion?
- what can the production and consumption of fashion tell us about social relations?
- what do you wear, and why?
- How much do you know about where the clothes you wear come from, and what material they are made of?

Seminar Preparation

Group D: Where have your clothes come from? What are they made of? (See Timmerman, K. (2011) Where am I Wearing? A global tour to the countries, factories, and people that make our clothes, Hoboken: Wiley: available as E-book) Think about student fashion: is it made of particular materials? Are there key student clothing brands? How do they operate?

Group A: Read Tokatli on Zara and Prada: how do these brands operate?
Tokatli, N. (2008) “Global sourcing: insights from the global clothing industry the case of Zara, a fast fashion retailer”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 21-38
Tokatli, N. (2014) “‘Made in Italy? Who cares!’ Prada’s new economic geography”, GeoForum, Vol. 54, pp. 1-9

Group B: Read Benzecry’s article on the Boca Junior jersey: how can a shirt mean so much? Does what it’s made of, its colour and design, matter?
Benzecry, C. (2008) “Azul y Oro: The Many Social Lives of a Football Jersey”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 49-76

Group C: Read about the Global Denim Project and the work of Miller and Woodward on Denim: Why has denim been popular? Are there different types and colours? Is denim losing its prominence and fashionability?
Miller, D. and Woodward, S. (2012) Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press (available as an E-book)

Further reading for all: In addition to the above, you may wish to read the extract from Simmel on Adornment (on Moodle): Is jewellery the same as fashion? Why wear it? Does it matter what form/material/colour of jewellery it is?

Session 5 Visit to The Design Museum, London

Whether or not you are attending next Friday’s visit to the Design Museum, your work on the module would benefit from engaging with the rich variety of works on design, aesthetics and design history.

A classic in this field is Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: Pevsner, N. (2005) [1960] Pioneers of Modern Design, 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press

More recently the work of Donald Norman and Harvey Molotch offers insights into the design of day to day objects:
Norman, D. (2002) The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books
Molotch, H. (2005) Where Stuff Comes From, New York: Routledge
and Julier, G. (2014) Culture of Design, London: Sage gives a useful overview:

As well as the design history of things/objects important to your everyday life, you might also wish to explore the history of the particular material comprising your object of interest, for example:

Galindo, M. (2012) Wood: architecture and design, Salenstein: Braun

More information about the exhibitions at the Design Museum can be found at the Design Museum website.

The new exhibition, Women, Fashion, Power has been featured in a number of pieces:
Daily Telegraph article;
Guardian article.

Lecture 4 Eating and Drinking

The fourth session on Friday October 24th will concern the most important processes that sustain us: eating and drinking. We will explore the role of technology in changing the relationships between humans, animals and foodstuffs, as well as the changing social practices and cultural meanings associated with food.

As ever with the module, the particular topic should be used as an example with wider lessons for your essay topic, suggesting potentially useful concepts and methods of analysis.

For example, many of you have been asked to read this widely cited piece which has lessons extending well beyond the analysis of the particular fruit in question: Cook, I. (2004) Follow the Thing: Papaya, Antipode, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 642-664.

Ian Cook has developed a wider online resource, applying the methodology in that paper: Follow the Things.

Think about why you eat and drink in the ways you do, where the ingredients come from, what kinds of creative and making processes you (or the cook/manufacturer/restaurant/store) deploy in transforming an array of material items into food and drink.

In addition you might wish to reflect on some of the emergent countercultural practices around food, for example the Slow Food Movement.

Lecture 3 Thinking Through Things: Thinking Things Through

The third lecture on Friday October 17th will focus on material culture with the aim of encouraging both intellectual reflection on and, depending on your group task, physical engagement with, things.

In addition to the specific group tasks, among the general readings and links you should consult for a deeper understanding of material culture are:

In anthropology, the work of Daniel Miller, notably his books Stuff and The Comfort of Things; Ian Hodder's book Entangled, and the work of Tim Ingold offer suggestive examples of the kind of orientation to the world that might stimulate your thinking about essays.

The social life of things and the idea of exploring things biographically is expressed in Appadurai, A. (Ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and a later version of the essay can be found in Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Past, London: Verso.

In philosophy, the ontological turn to an enhanced appreciation of materiality is evident in Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter, Durham: Duke University Press, and

Coole, D. and Frost, S. (Eds) (2010) New Materialisms, Durham: Duke University Press. In cultural studies the exploration of everyday life has produced much work on the significance of objects and things for routine cultural practices and ongoing senses of identity formation, see for example:
Highmore, B. (2011) Ordinary Lives, Abingdon: Routledge.

On material culture itself, aside from Daniel Miller, texts such as Woodward, I. Understanding Material Culture and Dant, T. Materiality and Society would be helpful, as would books on particular materials such as Sheller, M. (2014) Aluminium Dreams.

Lecture 2 Theories of Technology

The second lecture on the module on Friday October 10th will explore some of the available theories of technology, highlighting how they address the relationship between technology and social change.

In addition to the specific tasks you were asked to prepare for next week in your groups (as detailed in the E-mail you will have been sent), among the general resources you could explore to provide background for this seminar and foundations for your essay are:

Matthewman, S. (2011) Technology and Social Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Roe Smith, M. and Marx, L. (Eds) (1994) Does Technology Drive History? Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

On social constructionist approaches see:

Bijker, W., Hughes, T. and Pinch, T. (Eds) (2012) (1987) The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
The anniversary edition of that text is available as an E-book;
and a book of much wider interest than it sounds about the Moog synthesizer:
Pinch, T. and Trocco, F. (2002) Analog days: the invention and impact of the moog synthesizer, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; also available as an E-book.

On cultural-historical approaches books about energy, neon lighting and railway journeys listed under lecture 1 in the full reading list will provide many ideas for your essays, even if about other topics: e.g.

Schivelbusch, W. (1986) The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century, Berkeley: University of California

On actor-network theory

The work of Bruno Latour is essential:
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An introduction to actor-network theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press (available as an E-book).

Bruno Latour's site makes many of his articles available.

Another important thinker in actor-network theory is John Law of the Open University.

Lecture 1 Technology and Modernity

The first lecture of the module will be on Friday October 3rd, 9.00 a.m. Room A4, Law and Social Sciences. The lecture will outline the relationship between technology and social change through an examination of modernity, specifically technological innovation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Key thinkers on technology will be introduced, including Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Siegfried Giedion, Jacques Ellul.

For the seminar portion of the session - which will occur within the three hour block each week - you should read at least one of the following:

Heidegger, M. (1949)The Question Concerning Technology.
Pay close attention to Heidegger’s notion of enframing.

Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Updating Benjamin think about the implications of digital replicability of images

Forster, E. M. (1909) The Machine Stops.
Forster’s short story is a vision of a world depending on ‘the machine’ and is over a century old: it couldn’t happen, could it..., or has it...?

In addition to this reading, you should come to the session - if you can - equipped with the means to take photographs and either load them wirelessly to your Instagram photostream or E-mail address, or with the necessary wired connection to a USB port. You may be split into smaller groups and asked to picture something(s) and discuss your image(s) in front of the whole room.

Further important background reading for the module includes:

Mumford, L. (1934) Technics and Civilization, Routledge and Kegan Paul

Mumford, L. (1967) The Myth of the Machine, London: Secker and Warburg

Giedion, S. (1948) Mechanization Takes Command, New York: Oxford University Press

Ellul, J. (1964) The Technological Society, New York: Knopf

Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

There is no week by week textbook that the module will follow, however, the following texts will be helpful:

Johnson, D. and Wetmore, J. (Eds) (2009) Technology and Society: Building our Sociotechnical Future, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Mackenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (Eds) (1999) The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press

Matthewman, S. (2011) Technology and Social Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Miller, D. (2010) Stuff, Cambridge: Polity Press

Miodownik, M. (2013) Stuff Matters, London: Viking

Woodward, I. (2007) Understanding Material Culture, London: Sage

The assessment for the module invites you to write a 5,000 word essay about a topic/object/technology of your choice. A good way of orienting yourself to this task is to read case studies of technologies, artefacts and objects, however esoteric they may seem. Examples relevant for this week include:

Nye, D. (1990) Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Ribbat, C. (2013) Flickering Light: A History of Neon, London: Reaktion Books

The full reading list will be posted as a word document at the top of the module’s Moodle page by the end of September.