标签：technology

The Capitalization of Technology — Reflections on Han Qide’s Lecture

Culture & Public Commentary2010.12.02
The Capitalization of Technology — Reflections on Han Qide’s Lecture
Today we invited Professor Han Qide to give a lecture on “Reflections on the Value of Medical Technology Development.” This series of lectures in the course seems to have rather a lot of topics related to medicine, but there is a reason for having more rather than fewer: after all, the medical field is the place where the complex relations among science, technology, the humanities, ethics, society, politics, and so on are most concentrated and clearly embodied. Although many of the related issues had already been heard in previous lectures, Professor Han still brought quite a few fresh examples and viewpoints. What Professor Han focused on was the development of…
culture technology value capitalism
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2010年12月2日
Media and the Externalization of “Knowledge”

AI & the Future of Technology2010.11.15
Media and the Externalization of “Knowledge”
Reply to a netizen’s question: Why did knowledge change from a “virtue” into a “power”? Is it possible to reveal the root of this shift from the perspective of media? This is a great question ~ and it really can be revealed from the perspective of media. Roughly speaking, the media through which knowledge is displayed move from the age of oral speech, to manuscripts, and finally to printed books. In the oral age, the only or main way knowledge could be displayed was through speech; knowledge was displayed in lectures or debates. In such a situation, it is easy to imagine that the display of knowledge was always tied…
culture technology media knowledge
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2010年11月15日
Supplementary Remarks on Media Ontology

AI & the Future of Technology2010.08.15
Supplementary Remarks on Media Ontology
Phenomenology and philosophy of technology in Hailar are over. The trip was fairly pleasant, and I still have to write up the conference record, headache and all… Before reviewing the various papers and itineraries, let me first add a few notes to my own article. In the article, I originally used eyeglasses as an example to illustrate the reflective method of taking the medium as medium. When I reported it in Teacher Wu’s class, several people raised questions, so I added an example of a keyboard and a passage of explanation. The example I gave on the spot was the microphone at hand—when the microphone is put to use, it…
technology media Introduction to Philosophy of Technology knowledge
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2010年8月15日
Doctoral Research Plan (Media Phenomenology)

AI & the Future of Technology2010.04.13
Doctoral Research Plan (Media Phenomenology)
Following Professor Wu, the direction I am undoubtedly taking as my main focus in the doctoral stage is the philosophy of technology in phenomenology; more specifically, my research should be organized around the theme of “media phenomenology.” Under the theme of media phenomenology, my research can unfold from three angles, or in three ways. Depending on the progress of study and research over the next few years, the final doctoral dissertation will be confined to one of these angles and developed under an appropriate title. The themes and angles proposed in this research plan are merely lines of inquiry, or points of entry, for the research. This theme mainly involves…
technology media phenomenology McLuhan
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2010年4月13日
Winter Vacation Essays, No. 4: Green Dam—The Taboo of Eating Beef or the Taboo of Eating Pork

Culture & Public Commentary2010.02.08
Winter Vacation Essays, No. 4: Green Dam—The Taboo of Eating Beef or the Taboo of Eating Pork
I just bought a new laptop, ASUS’s new UL30V. A 13-inch widescreen, much lighter and more portable than my old laptop. ASUS’s biggest selling point is its super-durable battery: in power-saving mode, it is said to last 12 hours. It has both discrete and integrated graphics; when saving power, you can switch off the discrete card, and it still plays games just fine. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied. I bought it at a nearby computer market. The first shop quoted 6,000; after bargaining, I got it down to 5,750. The second shop opened at 5,250, and after haggling for ages I finally closed the deal at 5,000—yet it still…
culture technology children information
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2010年2月8日
A Cultural History, Technological History, and Intellectual History of Bathing

AI & the Future of Technology2009.07.31
A Cultural History, Technological History, and Intellectual History of Bathing
Now there are many people, especially urban residents, for whom bathing has become an indispensable part of daily life. Some people can scarcely imagine going three or five days in a row without bathing, let alone several months; to speak of people who do not bathe for months sounds almost like talking about aliens. Various things, once they become part of everyday life, are endowed with one or another sort of legitimacy, and thus become things that ought to be. Bathing, for example, is closely linked to the concept of “hygiene”: on the one hand, bathing is a natural thing—after all, isn’t bathing the expression of the “desire for cleanliness”…
book reading culture China technology
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2009年7月31日
When the End Seeps into the Process, So That the Means Too Become Ends

AI & the Future of Technology2009.07.15
When the End Seeps into the Process, So That the Means Too Become Ends
If doing certain things does not achieve the intended purpose (and doing something else might achieve it), then one may well regret it. And if doing certain things does achieve the intended purpose, but later one discovers that this purpose is not what one truly wanted, then one may also regret it. But there are some things one will not regret doing afterward: namely, those whose very process is the purpose, or, to put it another way, those whose purpose can be obtained on the spot in the course of the process itself. The most typical examples are games, and communication. Of course, you may regret becoming addicted to games,…
technology intentionality love purpose
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2009年7月15日
Langdon Winner: Do Artifacts Have Politics? — Translated by Gu Chi

AI & the Future of Technology2009.06.25
Langdon Winner: Do Artifacts Have Politics? — Translated by Gu Chi
This article’s existing Chinese translation appears in Wu Laoshi’s edited *Lectures on Philosophy of Technology*, translated by Liu Guoqi. That version is basically accurate and readable, though it still has many small problems. When I translated it, I mainly rendered it myself first and then revised it with reference to that translation. Although I did consult the existing Chinese version, this is after all my first complete translated work. Now that this course’s grades have come out, I might as well post the assignment here for the archive. The electronic edition of the English original can be found at: http://sts.nthu.edu.tw/tsts/trans/articles/ Do artifacts have politics? Langdon Winner Translated by Gu E…
book reading technology notes power
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2009年6月25日
Random Thoughts on Abacus and Numbers

AI & the Future of Technology2009.06.22
Random Thoughts on Abacus and Numbers
Speaking of which, it has been many years since I really had much contact with arithmetic. Even in high school, math competitions did not emphasize the actual operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, let alone during my entire university years. So much so that yesterday, when I suddenly had to handle a large number of digits in a number-guessing game, I abruptly discovered that the abacus in my mind had rusted over; moving each bead felt sluggish, and worse still, many of the beads had become badly loose, so that with one slip of the hand I would lose the exact count. After a few rounds my brain began…
technology mathematics touch
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2009年6月22日
The Structure of a Pirate Ship

Life & Notes2009.01.15
The Structure of a Pirate Ship
Noolat has a famous metaphor, roughly to the effect that science is like a ship sailing on the boundless sea: if something goes wrong, people can only repair it with whatever is on hand, or with things that can be salvaged from the sea. You might say it would be better to dismantle the ship and rebuild it from scratch, but the problem is that in this boundless sea the ship is our foothold; we can only keep sailing while repairing it. This metaphor is a good one; however, what those philosophers of science have not sufficiently noticed is that science is not an isolated, freely drifting thing in human…
technology scholarship philosophy of science autobiography
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2009年1月15日