The three articles provided, “Do Artifacts Have Politics” by Langdon Winner, “The Engineer as Social Radical” by J.C. Mathes and Donald H. Gray, and “Slums and City Planning” by Robert Moses, had several different parts that stood out to me as interesting. Each article had their own main focuses, Winner speaking about how objects and technologies in society having politics, Mathes and Gray about engineers being radicals or conservatives and technologies advancing in our society, and Robert Moses spoke about slums and how he would work towards the removal of slums in New York City. In “Do Artifacts Have Politics” by Langdon Winner first opens up his piece by speaking about how it is controversial to say that objects have political qualities.
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Mathes and Donald H. Gray spoke about engineers and how they are radicals, yet conservatives, and how technology advances in their article, “The Engineer as Social Radical.” The first point they made was how engineers technologies enable the tendencies conservatives fear, which makes engineers responsible for the development for the development of our changing society. Many conservatives try to keep from change, but it’s impossible to keep it from happening, especially with the advancements in technology. Engineers are responsible for most of the advancements that are being made, as they are the people who make software, computers, and the Internet, for example. Next, the article spoke about the effect of technology on societal structures, and of course engineers impact on it. Power and decision making in society, personal-community relationships, and family structures are all impacted. Family structures, particularly, are altered by technology. In our community, we typically have a drive “for a convenient life” (Mathes, J.C., and Donald H. Gray. “The Engineer as Social Radical.” The Ecologist, vol. 5, no. 4, May 1975, pp. 119–125.), which pushes us away further from one another. But technology allows us to communicate with one another, through phone calls as the article says, but now also through texts, social media, and any other form of communications engineers will create for us to use in the future. It was also important to mention that there was a new type of …show more content…
“Slums and City Planning.” The Atlantic, Jan. 1945.), and a place that can be taken up by a single family gets housed by multiple families. He compares these people who cannot afford higher priced living to chickens living in a coop, and says that as soon as a family makes enough money to move out, they do so, and another poor family comes to take their place. Because he does not support slums, he wants to eradicate them- and to do so, he believes if there is a schedule to have people move out of them and and have a program to do so, it is doable and possible for slums to be demolished. Then, there would be new housing in place of the buildings that stood, Moses wrote, that would be paid for by the higher class. Also mentioned was the possibility of just remodeling all of the current standing buildings, as they would have to be used when the new buildings are being built anyway. He ends by writing that slums are being prevented more as properties are now being built as multi-family residencies rather than single-family residencies, and that five out of six city planners for New York were not interested in resuming with building more
Mathes and Donald H. Gray spoke about engineers and how they are radicals, yet conservatives, and how technology advances in their article, “The Engineer as Social Radical.” The first point they made was how engineers technologies enable the tendencies conservatives fear, which makes engineers responsible for the development for the development of our changing society. Many conservatives try to keep from change, but it’s impossible to keep it from happening, especially with the advancements in technology. Engineers are responsible for most of the advancements that are being made, as they are the people who make software, computers, and the Internet, for example. Next, the article spoke about the effect of technology on societal structures, and of course engineers impact on it. Power and decision making in society, personal-community relationships, and family structures are all impacted. Family structures, particularly, are altered by technology. In our community, we typically have a drive “for a convenient life” (Mathes, J.C., and Donald H. Gray. “The Engineer as Social Radical.” The Ecologist, vol. 5, no. 4, May 1975, pp. 119–125.), which pushes us away further from one another. But technology allows us to communicate with one another, through phone calls as the article says, but now also through texts, social media, and any other form of communications engineers will create for us to use in the future. It was also important to mention that there was a new type of …show more content…
“Slums and City Planning.” The Atlantic, Jan. 1945.), and a place that can be taken up by a single family gets housed by multiple families. He compares these people who cannot afford higher priced living to chickens living in a coop, and says that as soon as a family makes enough money to move out, they do so, and another poor family comes to take their place. Because he does not support slums, he wants to eradicate them- and to do so, he believes if there is a schedule to have people move out of them and and have a program to do so, it is doable and possible for slums to be demolished. Then, there would be new housing in place of the buildings that stood, Moses wrote, that would be paid for by the higher class. Also mentioned was the possibility of just remodeling all of the current standing buildings, as they would have to be used when the new buildings are being built anyway. He ends by writing that slums are being prevented more as properties are now being built as multi-family residencies rather than single-family residencies, and that five out of six city planners for New York were not interested in resuming with building more