technology and politics essay

Essay on Technology Impact On Politics

Students are often asked to write an essay on Technology Impact On Politics in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Technology Impact On Politics

Technology changes how we vote.

Technology makes voting easier. People can now vote using computers and smartphones. This means more people can vote because they don’t have to go to a voting booth. But, there’s a risk. Hackers might try to change the votes, so we need to be careful.

Information at Our Fingertips

Because of the internet, we can find out a lot about politics quickly. We can read news, watch videos, and even talk to politicians on social media. This helps everyone know more about what’s happening in the world.

Social Media’s Power

Social media lets people share their opinions about politics easily. Sometimes, these opinions can influence other people’s thoughts. Politicians also use social media to talk to people and tell them about their plans. But, we have to remember that not everything we see on social media is true.

Technology and Political Campaigns

Politicians use technology to run their campaigns. They use websites, social media, and even text messages to ask for votes and donations. This way, they can reach a lot of people quickly and easily. But, this also means they need a lot of money to pay for all the technology.

250 Words Essay on Technology Impact On Politics

Technology has drastically altered the way politicians engage with voters and the way people interact with the political process. Here are some key ways in which technology has impacted politics:

Social Media Platforms:

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become powerful tools for politicians to communicate with voters and share their messages. They allow politicians to connect with a large audience instantly and bypass traditional media outlets.

Online Campaigning:

Technology has enabled online campaigning, making it easier for candidates to reach voters through digital channels. Online ads, email campaigns, and websites are now essential tools for modern political campaigns.

Data Analytics and Microtargeting:

Political campaigns now use data analytics to gather information about voters and target them with personalized messages. This allows campaigns to deliver tailored messages that resonate with specific groups of voters.

Fake News and Misinformation:

The spread of fake news and misinformation online has become a significant concern. False or misleading information can spread quickly on social media platforms, potentially influencing public opinion and electoral outcomes.

Cybersecurity and Election Security:

As technology becomes more integral to the political process, cybersecurity and election security have become vital issues. Protecting election systems from hacking and ensuring the integrity of votes is of paramount importance in the digital age.

In conclusion, technology has had a profound impact on politics, affecting the way campaigns are run, how voters are reached, and the overall political discourse. While technology offers powerful tools for political engagement, it also brings new challenges related to misinformation, privacy, and cybersecurity.

500 Words Essay on Technology Impact On Politics

Technology: transforming the political landscape.

In the realm of politics, technology has emerged as a formidable force, reshaping the way elections are conducted, how leaders communicate with their constituents, and how citizens engage with the political process. From social media to data analytics and artificial intelligence, the impact of technology on politics is profound and multifaceted.

Social Media: The New Town Square

Social media platforms have become the new town square, where politicians and citizens converge to share ideas, debate issues, and rally support. These platforms have empowered individuals to amplify their voices, hold leaders accountable, and organize grassroots movements.

Data Analytics: Unraveling Voter Behavior

Data analytics has revolutionized the way political campaigns are run. By harnessing the power of big data, campaigns can now tailor their messages and strategies to target specific voter demographics with laser-like precision. This data-driven approach has led to more effective and efficient campaigning.

Artificial Intelligence: Automating Political Processes

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its mark on politics as well. AI-powered chatbots are increasingly being used to interact with constituents, answering their questions, and providing information. AI is also being employed to automate tasks such as voter registration and campaign finance reporting.

Cybersecurity: Protecting the Integrity of Elections

As technology becomes more deeply ingrained in politics, the risk of cyberattacks and election interference grows. Hackers and malicious actors may attempt to disrupt elections, spread misinformation, or manipulate results. Cybersecurity measures are paramount to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process.

Technology: A Double-Edged Sword

While technology offers immense potential to enhance democracy and promote civic engagement, it also carries the risk of exacerbating existing inequalities. For instance, the digital divide may limit access to technology for certain segments of the population, potentially disenfranchising them from the political process.

Conclusion: Harnessing Technology for a Better Democracy

Technology is a powerful tool that can be harnessed to strengthen democracy and promote greater civic engagement. However, it is crucial to address the potential pitfalls and ensure that technology is used responsibly and equitably. By striking the right balance, we can leverage the power of technology to create a more informed, engaged, and inclusive political landscape.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Technology Impact On Globalization
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Happy studying!

Sample Essay On Technology And Politics

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Leadership , Health , Innovation , Politics , Vehicles , Technology , Development , World

Words: 2500

Published: 03/20/2020

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Technology could be defined as the ability to use scientific knowledge acquired for the purposes of communication, solving problems, to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, design and create information to improve learning in all areas of the everyday activities of the world. The scientific knowledge could be acquired through practicing or theoretical learning processes. The application of the knowledge gained by either process could be helpful in the development of the degradation of life's processes depending on how it is applied by different people. Technology is as a result of creativity and innovation. Learners must be creative thinkers and be innovative in order to gain technological knowledge. Politics, on the other hand, could be defined as a work of art or science that is concerned with the governance structures more so with a specified geographical area as a nation, village or county. Politics, therefore, has a more direct influence on the lives of the population of a given state or country. The policies that the government would adopt in fostering their development would largely be dependent on the political structures of that country. The education systems must also be convincing to the political class of the state for them to be accepted into the lives of the citizens. Every aspect of the country's progress in any given field would, consequently, be dependent upon the way in which they appealed to the political class. Technology and politics would, therefore, be two disciplines that would be deeply intertwined. Technology to a larger extent would be more dependent on the way the political class would approach technological issues. If any meaningful technological advances were t be realized in a country, it would, be significant for the proponents of the technological developments to engage the political class in a constructive dialogue. That would be aimed at embracing technology as a modern way of achieving faster developments in any front. This paper would, therefore, look at the relationship between technology and politics, more so how technology has affected African politics in general. Since the concept of civilization was coined and widely circulated, the world has witnessed some rapid developments on the technological front. Several sophisticated machines and other scientific inventions have been introduced in the modern world that could only be described as fantastic. I say wonderful because of the things that these machines have done to influence our lives. Some people would even wonder how the world that we live in today would be without technology. Several inventions and practices have been adopted that have shaped the world to be what it is today. Politics too has played a role in shaping technology to be the way it is today. The political leadership was never left behind in the adoption of new technological trends that would forever have an influence in the life of their citizens. It is a well-known fact that the colonization of the continent of Africa brought with it civilization to the mainland. The effects of migration, therefore, brought with it several advantages to the lifestyles of the ordinary Africans if the disadvantages were to be overlooked in this article. The advent of technology in Africa could be traced back to the colonial days. Political leadership organization too could also have taken shape from the colonial masters. Going back to the colonial days, the colonial rulers brought with them several items that the African cultures soon adopted as a way of life. The invention of the radio, for example, was a colonial strategy to conquer and rule the continent of Africa. It was a technological means that enabled the colonialists to communicate effectively and efficiently thereby allowing the colonial masters to gain new ground in the continent and could still be in touch with their homeland. The radio as a tool for communication also enabled the colonialists to share their experiences on how they could conquer and control the continent of Africa. The radio was also an effective tool for spreading false messages across the continent to make Africans believe that the colonialists were only interested in the development of Africa as the continent. That was aimed at softening their hearts so that they could warmly welcome the colonialists. The radio, therefore, enabled the political leadership of the colonial masters to consolidate their positions and be more organized in their approach to achieve their objective. That was to put the continent of Africa under their control. Fast forward to the post-colonial Africa, a radio, even though it has advanced technologically and had a better performance as compared to the colonial times, is still found in Africa. The African leadership has considered it a strategic tool not only for its variety of options, but also to communicate to their citizenry. The radio, today is used as a means of selling policies in the whole world when different political ideologies are competing for political power. The entrenched African political leadership too would still use the radio to spread propaganda messages to their citizenry to help them achieve self-benefiting ends. Consequently, it would be summarized that indeed, technology and politics are interrelated in the African context. The invention of means of transport would also be a remarkable breakthrough in the advancement of technology. If it were not for the invention of means of transportation, the planet earth could still have been far behind in technological advancements. The technological devices of the transport system enables one to move from one place to another with lots of speeds thereby saving the time one would have taken while using slower means of transport. It has enabled the citizenry as well as the political leaders to traverse the world efficiently in search of better living conditions either for themselves or for the benefit of the larger population. Today, politicians, in Africa included using the technological inventions of the transport sector to move from one place to another in an effort to consolidate their political control of the economies of their countries. Several technological advancements have been seen in this field that has enhanced both the speed and accuracy at which these means move. The invention of the airspace vessels like jets and choppers has only added to the excitement in this sector. These two ships in particular have enabled the political class to move from one place to another more so during political debates for political control of the country. Choppers, unlike bigger airbuses, have the potential to land anywhere so long as there would be some adequate space. This technological invention has greatly helped the modern day political leadership while looking to consolidate their support for policy formulation by their citizenry. It is without a shadow of doubt that the technological advancement has been the greatest boost to political leadership throughout the world. In the context of the African political establishment, the technical inventions in the transport sector have been a major boost to furthering their political agenda across the divide in political struggles. Another modern day technological invention that has also impacted positively with the political class was the design of audio visual machines. Technological inventions have enabled man to record, transmit and save for future purposes events that are happening in the modern world through audio visual machines. The designs of machines like video recorders, the television sets, digital cameras and other electronic gadgets that could transmit images from on part o another had some impact on the political establishment. For example, it is now possible for a political leader to address a political gathering from one end of the country, and technology has allowed for live transmission of that meeting to the rest of the world. This way, technology has greatly favored the ruling political class. The involvement of the political leadership in every aspect of the nation would not only be an imagination. But it would also be real as events across the country would be transmitted to the national audience thanks to the invention of technology. The engagement of technological advancements by the political leadership especially in Africa has so far worked for the benefit of the two sectors. Whereas the political class enjoys the advantages that come with the advance in technology, the technological companies enjoy the financial benefits that come with the application of the technical machines. Other than audiovisual developments, the advancements in telephony have also been a welcome invention to the African political leadership. The most appreciable design in this aspect was that of mobile phones. Just like the name suggests, mobile phones have enabled the political class to participate in the nation building in real time. As opposed to traditional means of information exchange, the policy classes have been able to communicate and share information with other development partners without having to necessarily commute to go and exchange ideas. This development has also enabled the local citizenry to exchange developmental ideas with the political class whenever they feel like as these devices allow them to communicate in real time. The continued advancements in the development of the mobile telephony have also opened new avenues for public participation in national affairs in the modern world. The new age mobile phones have applications that enable people to share and receive audio as well as video links. This improvement has also kind of opened up the democratic space for the citizens. As opposed to traditional methods, the new age systems of communication have given the population a leeway in interacting with the political leadership at different levels that have always worked to foster national unity and development. The technological advances in the communications industry I would say, have served better the citizens as it has served more options to the political class by means of interacting with the residents. It has fastened and made simpler the delivery of political messages that have the direct impact on the lives of the ordinary citizens. Alternative aspect that technology greatly revolutionized was the healthcare sector. The effects of technology on the healthcare sector had bigger changes to the African traditional settings and to a greater extent the management of political policies regarding health care provision. Like we mentioned earlier, the political influence on the peoples' cultures and practices were one aspect that could not be wished away with ease. In reality, politics shaped the lives of the ordinary citizens who might not have to necessarily participate in political contests. The technological inventions in the health care have been one aspect that has had the greater impact on the lives of the ordinary citizens. Before the era of colonialism, Africa relied on traditional medicine in the cure of diseases. The mastered the herbs so much that they could never imagine a future without the herbal medicine. When the colonialists came, education came along with them. People advanced in research and with the advancements in the technological inventions, better medicine that was nicely packed was found for the cure of many diseases as opposed to the traditional hers that were indigenously used. Further research also enabled the modification of machines that could test and detect diseases in the human body. Not only did the machines detect diseases, but research also provided for a mechanism for countering these conditions thereby eradicating them from the human body. Nothing could have lightened up the spirits of the political class than that of technological breakthroughs in the healthcare sector. The political leadership needed a healthy population to control. The achievements attained in the health sector meant that the population could no longer be a diseased lot, thanks to technology. Several lifesaving machines have since been developed through technological advancements. Technical machines like life support machine have been invented and have had a greater impact on the average population. These could only come as good news to the politicians as they would be able to gamble in their campaigns to bring state of the art machines to improve the quality of life for the electorates. The achievements of technology in the healthcare sector have only served to lighten up the spirits of the political elite. The belief in technology by the political class could only prove how important technology would be to politics and how much the technicians would also need politicians to advance their technical skills in the development of state of the art machines. The improvement in tools that were used in the African culture has also taken new technological twists that have had forbearing on the national right of the citizens, as well as the political class. The traditional tools that were used in the traditional African culture to help in their daily activities were overtaken by technology. For example, today, there are tractors that could be used in tilling large parcels of farms at the expense of the traditional homes that were regarded as useful back then. This technological improvement could not be any good news to any class of the society like the political class. In their campaigns for political leadership, the politicians have always promised to look for modern ways of making the lives of the ordinary citizens better. There would be no better way to achieve this than to embrace technology. Consequently, as opposed to traditional farming methods where a lot of energies was expended, modern technological techniques have been adopted by the political leadership to help reduce labor output and maximize agricultural inputs. The advantages of these technological advances in the agricultural sector have only served to tighten the bonds between the political class and the ordinary citizens. The developments in technology that have been embraced by the political class have so far worked for the benefits of the local citizens.In conclusion, in as much as technology and politics are two diverse areas of concentration, we have successfully demonstrated in this paper that the two could actually go together. That could be more visible in the African context. The African culture like it was back in the day before civilization was considered as backward. With the advent of technology, new techniques of doing things have been embraced thanks to technological intervention. The technological developments like we have demonstrated needed goodwill from the political class in order to take root in the country. Political goodwill, though, comes with the extra package of adding value to the profile of the political class. The political class, therefore, would need the technology in order to advance their political interests and achieve their political dreams. Technology, on the other hand would need the goodwill of the political class in order to showcase their technical skills aimed at improving the technological aspect of the society. It is my submission, therefore, that technology and politics could be directly or indirectly interrelated more so in the African politics.

Bibliography

Bruijn, Mirjam de, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, and Inge Brinkman. Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa, 2009. Nwokeafor, Cosmas U., and Kehbuma Langmia. Media and Technology in Emerging African Democracies. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010.

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The Future of Digital Spaces and Their Role in Democracy

Many experts say public online spaces will significantly improve by 2035 if reformers, big technology firms, governments and activists tackle the problems created by misinformation, disinformation and toxic discourse. Others expect continuing troubles as digital tools and forums are used to exploit people’s frailties, stoke their rage and drive them apart

Table of contents.

1. A sampling of some of the key overarching views
2. Public digital spaces will be improved: Tech can be fixed, governments and corporations can reorient incentives and people can band together to work for reform
3. Large improvement of digital spaces is unlikely by 2035: Human frailties will remain the same; corporations, governments and the public will not be able to make reforms
4. Work is needed now to prepare for a mind-bending future
5. Closing thoughts
6. About this canvassing of experts
Acknowledgments

This is the 13th “ Future of the Internet ” canvassing Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to gather expert views about important digital issues. In this report, the questions focused on the prospects for improvements in the tone and activities of the digital public sphere by 2035. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next decade represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. Pew Research Center and Elon’s Imagining the Internet Center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, inviting professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses and think tanks, as well as interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 29 and Aug. 2, 2021. In all, 862 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the section titled “ About this canvassing of experts .”

Those who worry about the future of democracy focus a lot of their anxiety on the way that the things that happen in online public spaces are harming deliberation and the fabric of society. To be sure, billions of users appreciate what the internet does for them. But the climate in some segments of social media and other online spaces has been called a “ dumpster fire ” of venom, misinformation, conspiracy theories and goads to violence.

Social media platforms are drawing fire for their role in all of this. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a congressional panel requested that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Parler, 4chan, Twitch and TikTok release all records related to misinformation around the 2020 election, including efforts to influence or overturn the presidential election results. In September 2021, a five-part series in The Wall Street Journal exposed details that seem to show that Facebook has allowed the diffusion of misinformation, disinformation and toxicity that has resulted in ethnic violence and harm to teenage girls and has undermined COVID-19 vaccination efforts. And The Journal’s source, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, followed up by telling the U.S. Senate that she had gone public with her explosive material “because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy.”

Worries over the rise in the acrid tone and harmful and manipulative interactions in some online spaces, and concerns over the role of technology firms in all of this, have spawned efforts by tech activists to try to redesign online spaces in ways that facilitate debate, enhance civility and provide personal security. A selection of these initiatives were described in a spring 2021 article in The Atlantic Monthly by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev. Among the suggested solutions documented in the piece:

The creation of an internet version of public media along the lines of PBS and NPR;
“ Middleware ” that could allow people to set an algorithm to give them the kind of internet experience they want, perhaps without the dystopian side effects;
Online upvoting systems that favor content that could push partisans toward consensus, rather than polarizing them;
An internet “bill of rights” allowing “self-sovereign identity” that lets people stay anonymous online, but weeds out bots; and
“ Constructive communication ” systems set up to dial down anger and bridge divides.

In light of the current conversations about the need to rethink and redesign online public spaces, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts how they expect the digital public sphere to evolve by 2035. Some 862 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to this specific question:

Looking ahead to 2035, will digital spaces and people’s use of them be changed in ways that significantly serve the public good?

Some 61% chose the option declaring that, “yes,” by 2035, digital spaces and people’s uses of them will change in ways that significantly serve the public good; 39% chose the “no” option, positing that by 2035, digital spaces and people’s uses of them will not change in ways that significantly serve the public good.

It is important to note that a large share of who chose “yes” – that online public spaces would improve by 2035 – also wrote in their answers that the changes between now and then could go either way. They often listed one or more difficult hurdles to overcome before that outcome can be achieved. Thus, the numeric findings reported here are not fully indicative of the troubles that they think lie between now and 2035.

In fact, in answer to a separate question in which they were asked how they see digital spaces generally evolving now, a majority ( 70% ), said current technological evolution has both positives and negatives , 18% said digital spaces are evolving in a mostly negative way that is likely to lead to a worse future for society, 10% said the online world is evolving in a mostly positive way that is likely to lead to a better society, and about 3% said digital spaces are not evolving in one direction or another .

It is also worth noting that the responses were gathered in mid-summer of 2021. People’s responses came in the cultural context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and at a time when rising concerns over climate change , racial justice and social inequality were particularly prominent – and half a year after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol in the aftermath of one of the most highly contentious U.S. presidential elections in recent history.

This is a nonscientific canvassing, based on a nonrandom sample. The results represent only the opinions of the individuals who responded to the queries and are not projectable to any other population.

The bulk of this report covers these experts’ written answers explaining their responses to our questions. They sounded many broad themes in sharing their insights about the evolution of the digital “town squares” most people frequent.

The themes are outlined in the tables that follow below:

As they considered these questions, some of these experts predicted that changes of a different order of magnitude are also in store by 2035. Some of the most compelling ideas include:

Brad Templeton advanced a “new moral theory [that] it is wrong to exploit known flaws in the human psyche.” He argues that the embrace of “psyche-exploitation avoidance” would lead to a new design of online spaces.
Mike Liebhold outlined a future with applied machine intelligence everywhere, continuous pervasive cybersecurity vulnerabilities, ubiquitous conversational bot agents, holographic media and telepresence and cobotics (collaborative robotics), among other things.
Carolina Rossini predicted that a regulatory agency to monitor technology’s impact on health – a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for algorithms – will arise as increasing numbers of digital technology tools are placed in people’s bodies.
Raashi Saxena urged, “We do not have a global, agreed-upon list of digital harms that can be inflicted upon us … We first need to define the rights to be protected.”
Jerome Glenn said a new civilization will emerge as the “Information Age” gives way to the “Conscious-Technology Age” through the force of two megatrends: “First, humans will become cyborgs, as our biology becomes integrated with technology. Second, our built environment will incorporate more artificial intelligence.”
Cory Doctorow said the “tyranny of network effects” will be broken if interoperability is imposed on tech companies so that, for instance, people could move their social media networks from one platform to another and easily abandon online spaces they do not like.
Robin Raskin predicted, “The metaverse – digital twins of real worlds or entirely fabricated worlds – will be a large presence by 2035, unfortunately with some of the same bad practices on the internet today such as personal-identity infringements.”
Beth Simone Noveck expects new “governance models” for public online spaces that allow citizens and groups to participate directly in policymaking and provision of services.
James Hendler believes there will be tech advances that allow people to control their online identities and privacy preferences in ways that thwart omnipresent surveillance schemes.
Barry Chudakov predicts “the self will go digital” and exist in the flesh and in its digital avatar. “Identity is thereby multiple and fluid: Roles, sexual orientation and self-presentation evolve from solely in-person to in-space.”

In the next chapter, there is a collection of responses from technology and academic experts that cover a range of issues tied to online public spaces and are noteworthy for their insights, and for the prominence of the respondents. It closes with two essay-style responses to these questions from internet sages Barry Chudakov and Judith Donath .

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts , its primary funder.

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The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis

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40 Technology as a Site and Object of Politics

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Published: 02 September 2009
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This article analyses the conception of technology as a site and object of politics. It presents four narratives that provide a rationale for a lively politics of technology and each case had given rise to its distinctive conceptual dialectic articulated through specific constellations of political actors, controversies, discourses, and forms of action. It suggests that technology as a site and object of politics displays itself clearly in four linked yet separate aspects: as risk, as design, as standard, and as ethical constraint. On each front politics has played out as a dialectic between competing propositions. The article concludes that the politics of technology is the play and the ploy through which today's citizens can assert control over potentially dangerous extensions of their ambitiously inventive selves.

Technology . A composite of Greek technē (skill) and logos (study of), the term as normally defined exudes utility and resists abstraction. It is, as most dictionaries tell us, simply the use of established scientific principles to solve practical problems. It is no more than the extension of our normal capabilities to achieve what most of us desire anyway: to alleviate pain and misery; ease work; increase wealth; overcome physical and temporal barriers to action; and open up previously inaccessible worlds to human insight and exploration. Technology allows our species to acquire the bodies and minds, the environments, and the entertainments that we collectively aspire to; through it, we fashion the lives that our imaginations have rendered desirable. Technology, so viewed, is instrumental and mechanistic. It realizes visions, but seems itself to remain value‐free. It is an extension of the self, a productive force, the ultimate enabler, but for all that a tool, subject to ideas and ideals that originate elsewhere, outside the sphere of the technological. Where, then, in technology's ambit do we find the spaces of the political?

Myths offer instructive points of departure. As dreams have their obverse in nightmares, so the narrative of technology as a liberating and empowering force has its jarring counterpoint in stories of error, failure, and loss of control. Technology, in these darker accounts, not only enables but also constrains. It produces unforeseen harms, sets up obstinate hierarchies, channels and manages possible forms of life, and subordinates human capabilities to its own impersonal, destructive logics of rationality and domination. Unmanaged technology, we are constantly reminded, can give rise to disorder and misrule. Four powerful myths have crystallized around these not unconnected fears. They represent technology, in turn, as unavoidable risk , as immutable design , as dehumanizing standard , and as ethical constraint . Through these four lenses, and the events and reflections that each opens onto we can map the politics of technology as it is enacted and experienced in the contemporary world.

Icarus, son of Greece's legendary artisan Daedalus embodies the age‐old figure of technology as risk. Icarus inherited his father's daring but neither his foresight nor his wisdom. Daedalus escaped from captivity in Crete with wings ingeniously crafted of feathers and wax, but Icarus fell to his death when he flew too near the sun, whose heat melted the wax and destroyed his wings. In a tragic modern inversion of the myth, the US space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all seven crewmembers aboard, when its stiff rubber O‐rings failed to seal in the streaming hot gases during a launch in the unexpected cold of a late January morning in Florida (Vaughan 1996) . Molten wax, nonresilient O‐rings: both testify to the dangers of reaching for superhuman heights with less than perfect understanding of the instruments at the explorer's disposal.

For technology as design, we may turn again to Daedalus, father of Icarus, the master builder who conceived the Cretan labyrinth, a maze so difficult to penetrate that it safely held the half‐human, half‐bull Minotaur, although it also prevented the escape of the youthful victims ritually led in to satisfy the monster's inhuman appetites. It took a woman's ingenuity and a man's hardihood, Ariadne's ball of string unwound by Theseus, to end the Minotaur's dominion and bring the victor back out alive. But escape is not nearly so easy from the construct that, following Jeremy Bentham (1995 [1787]) , Michel Foucault (1995) conceived as modernity's most characteristic architectural achievement: the Panopticon, the circular, transparent building from whose central watchtower a single guard could hold a community of prisoners within a web of permanent surveillance.

Fast forward to the twentieth century, where Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World provides the canonical myth of technology as an instrument of standardization. Here we find humanity's craving for safety and order driven to pathological extremes. Huxley's world is one from which suffering in its grosser forms has been banished. But in exchange for freedom from hunger and illness, fear and pain, lost too are the powers of creativity, empathy, and self‐fulfillment that liberal societies see as the cornerstones of lives worth living. In this controlled society, people themselves are graded and sorted into classes whose capacities are carefully tailored to the functions they perform. Reason crowds out emotion; the system's logic overrides its members' desire for self‐expression. Many have deplored this transformation of the human from godlike inventor to cog in the machine as one of modern technology's worst unintended consequences ( Bauman 1991 ; Habermas 1984 ; Ellul 1964 ).

Finally, for technology as ethical transgression, the story that has haunted the Western imagination like none other for nearly two centuries is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . Written in 1816 by a girl of nineteen, the tale of the Swiss scientist who built from inanimate matter a being he could not control has become the quintessential fable of technological over‐reaching. The Frankenstein myth was infused with new life when, in 1997, Ian Wilmut's research group at Scotland's Roslin Institute announced the birth of Dolly, a sheep created from a mammary gland cell of a six‐year‐old ewe, and hence genetically identical to her “mother.” The announcement refuted biologists' long‐held belief that cells in adult bodies, human or animal, were fixed into specialized roles that could not be altered. Real life appeared once again to reprise the elements of myth, as technology reversed the expected course of nature, created a hitherto unknown kind of living thing, and by foreshadowing similar manipulation of human beings, seemed to outstrip the moral intuitions and rule-making capacity of elected lawmakers.

These four framing narratives are not, of course, wholly independent of one another. Fear of technology's harmful consequences is intimately linked, for instance, to concerns about ethical violations. The charge of “playing God” applies as much to acts that are perceived to contradict the natural order of things (e.g. cloning humans) as to acts of managerial ambition which through lack of adequate foreknowledge, misfire and expose society to disproportionate harms. 1 Similarly, to the extent that technology orders or designs the physical and psychological parameters of human existence, it does so through sometimes forcible processes of standardization that demarcate normal social identities and behaviors from those regarded as deviant or abnormal ( Hacking 1999 ; Foucault 1978 ).

Each of the four narratives provides a rationale for a lively politics of technology, although as we shall see each has also given rise to its own distinctive conceptual dialectic, articulated through specific constellations of political actors, controversies, discourses, and forms of action. Common to all four as well is that disputes in each center on the ambiguous figure of the technical expert. Appearing in force on the political scene since the late eighteenth century (Golan 2004) , experts are primarily charged with providing assurances that it is safe to live with the powers unleashed by technology. But experts also operate as lightning rods for controversy in every area of contested application: weaponry, surveillance, polling, medical intervention, transportation, energy use, and communication, to name some of the most significant. All of these politically charged technologies raise questions about the competence, foresight, interests, and wisdom of experts ( Jasanoff 1995 ; Nelkin 1992 ). They also cast doubt on the possibility of democratic rule in societies where technically trained elites perform so much of the everyday work of governance (Price 1965) .

1 The Politics of Risk

On any day in 2005 at any major airport in the United States, an anthropologically inclined onlooker would have observed a strange ritual. Lines of slow‐moving, ticketed passengers, loaded down with bags and packages of varying colors and contours, walk up to a conveyor belt and start divesting themselves of assorted items under the watchful eyes of uniformed guards: laptop computers are removed from their cases, pockets emptied of anything metallic, belts removed, coats and scarves piled into plastic trays, bags and packages put on the belt, and most bizarre of all, shoes and boots taken off in preparation for the owners' awkward passage through the rectangular arch of a metal detector. On the other side of the barrier, the process reverses itself, as pocket and briefcase contents are returned to their places, jackets and coats donned again, and shoes put back on stockinged feet. Speeded up, the anthropologist might think, it would make a hilarious cartoon sequence of people going through apparently meaningless motions—and so it would if only the stakes were not so grave.

The increased intensity of airport security screening around the world is, of course, a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington, in which nineteen young Islamic militants destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and parts of the Pentagon, killing themselves and some 3000 others in the process. But why must all those shoes come off, and why especially in the United States? One man's actions at the turn of the twenty‐first century changed the conditions of travel for 688 million passengers a year on US domestic airlines. Richard Reid, a Briton with ties to the Al Qaeda organization held responsible for the 9/11 attacks, boarded an American Airlines flight in Paris on December 22, 2001, with enough explosives to destroy the plane packed into his shoes. His attempt to light the fuse that would have converted his shoes into bombs was foiled in time, but the episode turned every shoe worn by every airline passenger into a suspected weapon, and hence (unless exonerated as containing no metal) a target of special screening, regardless of the costs in time, inconvenience, and embarrassment for passengers or in added demands on overworked security personnel.

The instant transformation of that most mundane of civilian artifacts, the shoe, into an object of military interest—a potential weapon—underlined the sociologist Ulrich Beck's (1992) argument that the global spread of science and technology has spawned a “risk society,” in which everyone regardless of social class or standing, is exposed to incalculable, possibly catastrophic threats that do not lend themselves to rational control. Technologies earlier seen as safeguards against risk (shoes to prevent injury or infection, for example) can suddenly reveal themselves as sources of unexpected danger. The sweeping in of so many million shoes into the purview of airport surveillance systems also points to a fact about risk that social psychologists have noted for some time: that people are particularly concerned about risks that arouse dread—through their unfamiliarity, scope, or uncontrollability (especially of new technologies)—and they will in consequence spend more to control low‐probability, high‐consequence events than they will to regulate more ordinary hazards like bicycling accidents, that may in the aggregate cause greater damage to lives or property ( Slovic et al. 1980 ; 1985 ).

Politically, these observations have played into two quite different responses to the governance or management of risk; these may be labeled the technocratic and the democratic . Grounded in a positivistic commitment to the view that risks are determinate probabilities of harm, and a corresponding faith in the power of experts to calculate these probabilities correctly, the technocratic approach seeks to insulate the process of risk analysis as far as possible from the distorting influence of plebeian politics ( Breyer 1993 ; NRC 1983 ). The calculation of probabilities, termed risk assessment, is deemed a matter for experts; the choice of acceptable risk levels and control policies is relegated to a later stage of risk management, in which public values are permitted to come into play. Key to implementing this strategy is a commitment to formal assessment methods and rigorous review by experts, followed by a quantitative comparison of the costs and benefits of risk reduction, so as to arrive at the most rational (understood as most economically efficient) regulatory outcomes. This normative preference for efficiency entails additional prescriptions that bear on the relations between experts and the public in risk decisions: that experts should be considered more trustworthy than laypersons when disagreements arise about the severity of risk ( Sunstein 2002 ; 2005 ); that benefits from reducing one risk should be offset against the costs of others that might thereby be increased (Graham and Wiener 1995) ; and that more should be done to communicate risks properly to the public, so as to bring their perceptions in line with those of experts.

Western governments throughout the last third of the twentieth century took pains to ensure that their citizens would not, on the basis of uninformed opinions and unfounded fears, reject technological innovations that the state's own experts had deemed safe or bearable. To this end, governments made considerable investments in the public understanding of science and technology. Democratic states were particularly committed to this policy, because technology for them was not merely an engine of wealth creation but also, as in grand nation‐building projects like the atomic bomb or the Apollo mission, a potent instrument of self‐legitimation (Ezrahi 1990) . To the skeptical citizens of modern democracies, such technological successes offer a compelling demonstration that the state is acting effectively on their behalf. But to appreciate the successes as successes, states recognized, citizens must be taught to perceive the risks and benefits of technology in the same way as experts. Programs to enhance the public's scientific understanding aimed to fulfill this pedagogical mission, but these efforts encountered both political and conceptual difficulties (Wynne 1995) .

If the technocratic approach to risk management recommends sealed‐off spaces for expert deliberation, the democratic response seeks rather to enlarge the role of public participation in decision‐making about risk. 2 Opponents decry this trend as misguided populism: an overreaction to singular, self‐contained cases of mismanagement, like the transmission of “mad cow” disease to humans through poor agricultural practices in Britain in the 1980s; or a working out of the erroneous principle that the people's preferences should prevail in democracies regardless of the facts found by experts (Sunstein 2002) ; or the application of an extreme relativizing tendency in the sociology of knowledge that places lay experience on a par with specialized expert knowledge (Collins and Evans 2002) . At stake in the move to democratize risk management, however, is not a new form of class warfare between experts and laypeople, the epistemic haves and have‐nots of modern knowledge societies, but rather a struggle over who should assess the purposes of technology and with it the meaning of lives worth living.

Supporting this analysis are numerous studies that reveal risk to be a deeply constructed phenomenon, a function in part of long historical and cultural legacies that predispose societies to regard some harms as worth enduring and others not. 3 European welfare states, for example, have judged the threats to social solidarity flowing from grossly inequitable distributions of risks, as well as the potential public costs of compensation for faulty predictions, to be less tolerable than has the neoliberal United States (Rosanvallon 2000) . To this disparity may be attributed the European Union's embrace of the precautionary principle as a normative basis for health, safety, and environmental regulation in the 1990s (Tickner 2003) , a stance that US politicians and analysts committed to the expert discourse of risk assessment dismissed as unscientific, protectionist, or a sign of weakness and insecurity ( Sunstein 2005 ; Kagan 2003 ). Embedded in well‐entrenched regulatory institutions and practices, these disparate orientations to risk may be taken for granted by those within the system, and indeed be accepted as part of the natural order of things until comparative analysis reveals the cultural specificity of some of the underlying premises. 4

Advocates of the democratic approach also point out that, when experts and laypersons disagree about risk governance, they are not necessarily focusing on the same object of inquiry. While experts are chiefly concerned with the probability of deterministic failures in technological systems, publics may care more about issues of purpose and responsibility (Irwin and Wynne 1996) . Put differently, experts and publics (and even different expert communities 5 ) frame risks differently, with consequent differences in the questions asked and the explanations deemed satisfactory. Mathematical formulations, the preferred discourse of expert risk analysis, fail to address lay concerns for metaphysics and morality. What new ontologies are technologies bringing into the world (e.g. robots, anti‐depressants, genetically modified crops), and how desirable are they (Haraway 1991) ? Who benefits from technologies that might malfunction and cause catastrophic harm? What mechanisms are in place to compensate those who may suffer from technological breakdowns? A costly mistake like “mad cow” disease operates in this context to reinforce legitimate public concerns about the reliability of expertise, as well as about institutional irresponsibility at the highest levels of governmental or corporate power. Far from operating according to what the sociologist Brian Wynne has termed the “deficit model”—which represents the lay citizen as a technically illiterate, emotionally undisciplined actor—the public emerges in the light of this analysis as capable of sophisticated and reflective institutional analysis, and possibly better able than acknowledged experts to evaluate the implications of technological design for democratic governance ( Irwin and Wynne 1996 ; Wynne 1995 ).

The dismissive label “populist” also denigrates the experiential knowledge, or lay expertise ( Collins and Evans 2002 ; NRC 1996 ) that various publics bring to the assessment of risks. Such knowledge stems in part from people's close personal acquaintance with actual, rather than ideally imagined uses of technology; exclusion of this kind of knowledge cannot be considered innocent from the standpoint of decision-making, since it not infrequently leads to disaster ( Jasanoff 1994 ; Wynne 1988 ). Experiential knowledge, too, is often buried within organizational frameworks that impede its free flow or effective use and uptake by those in power. 6 Expert risk analyses may fail to take account of such stickiness until after bad events have occurred. Nation states can be seen in the light of these observations as particularly complex organizations that command distinctive means of framing technological risks and producing and testing public facts. These “civic epistemologies” (Jasanoff 2005) , or patterned ways of generating politically relevant knowledge provide a further argument for broadening expert risk deliberations so as to accommodate a polity's preferences for culturally specific forms of reasoning, proof, and argument. 7

2 The Politics of Design

The labyrinth and the Panopticon—the one dark and inward‐leading, the other transparent and outward‐gazing, but both equally confining—appropriately capture the power of technology to design the conditions of life. Both imaginings, moreover, make clear how intimately technological design is bound up with projects of governance writ large. Daedalus was not a free agent; he served King Minos of Crete, so well in fact that the king eventually imprisoned him to keep him from seeking another master. Bentham, the quintessential utilitarian conceived the Panopticon as an efficient means for the state to control disorderly prison populations with the least investment of resources. Indeed, incorporating normative principles into the design of buildings and other material objects has proved to be an efficacious means of regulation at every scale of social organization, from global to smallest local.

That “artifacts have politics” (Winner 1986) is widely acknowledged. Langdon Winner offered as an example the famously low underpasses designed by Robert Moses for New York's suburban highways, supposedly in order to keep busloads of black day‐trippers away from white residential enclaves. Social exclusion was in this way built into the design of urban infrastructure. Feminist theoreticians and historians have pointed to the gendered implications of technological design, whether to exclude women from some lines of work or to insert them more deeply into traditionally female gender roles ( Wajcman 1991 ; Cowan 1983 ). More generally, the French philosopher of technology, Bruno Latour calls attention to the regulative capacity of all sorts of mundane artifacts, such as the speed bump, or “sleeping policeman,” which serves in lieu of a human traffic controller (Latour 1992) . Through their very materiality, technologies exert power; once in place, they cannot easily be redesigned or removed. The question of paramount concern for democratic politics, then, is whose design choices matter. Who in fact designs technologies?

In the most optimistic accounts, it is the users of technology who have the final say. Technologies, according to this view are socially constructed by various stakeholder groups: thus, consumer preferences ultimately control whether bicycles will have ten speeds or cars come equipped with anti‐lock brakes (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987) . Objecting that this account unduly privileges the social at the expense of the material, proponents of actor‐network theory have argued that non‐human actants also participate in the making of design, offering resistances that human actors must overcome in order to make a technology function (Callon 1986) . Others, however, dismiss both streams of constructivist analysis as perpetuating the myth of market liberalism while ignoring the complex macro‐political economy of global manufacturing. Aided by compliant experts, sovereign states and their official sub-units have historically invested huge resources in promoting specific technological designs, especially in the areas of military technologies and their offshoots in the fields of computers and information technology ( Edwards 1996; , MacKenzie 1990 ), and latterly also in biomedicine. Under totalitarian rule, this partnership of science and technology with the state can lead to such practical and ethical disasters as Soviet agriculture and Nazi medicine ( Bauman 1991 ; Proctor 1988 ); but even in liberal democratic nations non‐transparent alliances between experts and their political masters can produce “closed worlds” of discourse ( Eden 2004 ; Edwards 1996 ; Gusterson 1996 ), underwriting virtually invisible, publicly inaccessible, and from the standpoint of human welfare, highly questionable choices in the development of technology.

Corporations emerged in the nineteenth century as equally important players in the politics of design, with their own stables of experts, whose capacity for inventiveness the law turned into economically useful “intellectual property.” By the end of the twentieth century, the power of corporations to disseminate their techno‐normative design choices around the globe surpassed that of many nation states ( Noble 1976 ; 1977 ). In a world so dominated by the military‐industrial complexes of developed nations, and by the monopoly power of companies like Microsoft or MacDonald's, end‐users have little latitude to criticize, let alone shape basic design choices. Even the Internet, once hailed as the architectural framework for a genuinely free exchange of ideas and information, a quintessential “technology of freedom” (de Sola Poole 1983) , seemed to be turning under corporate dominance into a space for controlled communication and closely held ownership of thought (Lessig 2001) .

Against this backdrop, the politics of technological design has taken shape between the theoretical ideal of participation and the practical possibilities of resistance . Despite calls for greater democratization of design choices ( Sclove 1995 ; Winner 1986 ), dethroning experts in the pay of capital has not proved easy and resistance remains the more readily available means of political expression. In one celebrated, late twentieth‐century example, Monsanto, the leading US producer of agricultural biotechnology announced its intention to develop a technique of gene modification that would render the seeds of staple crops sterile by design, and hence unusable from year to year. If carried through, this project might have affected millions of poor farmers who, having planted their fields with Monsanto's seeds, would have had to return to the company for new seeds each year. In this case, a development activist organization, the Rural Advancement Foundation International, later known as the ETC Group launched an extremely effective campaign against Monsanto's so‐called “terminator technology,” forcing the company to back down. The result, in effect, was the abandonment of a trajectory of product development that would, by novel technological means, have shifted control of seed fertility from farmers to a corporate patent holder. For the most part, however, corporate design choices remain shielded from early public review under a tacit social contract that grants confidentiality to the innovation process and leaves it to the market to determine the acceptability of already realized technologies.

Multinational institutions created in the aftermath of the Second World War have become another rallying point for the politics of resistance, especially as reflected in worldwide contestation over the goals, methods, and processes of development (Stiglitz 2002) . The rise of an anti‐globalization movement, represented in force at the World Trade Organization's third ministerial conference in Seattle in November 1999, put questions of public and corporate accountability at the head of the international political agenda, with a specific focus on issues of technological design. Protest centered in part on large‐scale projects of environmental and social engineering, such as the construction of high dams to meet power and irrigation needs in many parts of the developing world. Planned and carried out on a wave of enthusiasm for modernization, these dams became by the later decades of the twentieth century symbols of ill‐conceived technological design in many newly independent nations. Not only had the expert designers failed to take account of the dams' long‐term environmental consequences, but as protest movements dramatically demonstrated, they had also ignored the impacts on the lives of people made landless and homeless through these massive relocation projects ( Khagram 2004 ; Hall 1990 ). As the armies of the dispossessed gained voice and visibility (Roy 1999) , even impersonal global institutions like the World Bank were forced to reconsider their development policies and become more open to inputs from below (Goldman 2005) .

Given that slightly more than half the developing world's labor force still consisted of farm workers around the turn of the century, it is perhaps not surprising that improving agricultural technologies surfaced as a prime objective for development experts. The Green Revolution of the 1960s showed that scientific techniques could be applied to producing significantly higher‐yielding grain varieties, with the possibility of reducing hunger worldwide. But success in raising yields did little to alter underlying problems of poverty and inequality, and political discourse fifty years later remained stubbornly divided over whether the revolution had succeeded in its normative, as opposed to its technical goals. In local contexts, where the lines between rich and poor often solidified, the Green Revolution spawned numerous acts of resistance, employing what the political scientist James Scott (1976 ; 1985 ) evocatively termed “weapons of the weak.”

On the larger canvas of globalization, the failure to eradicate poverty, guarantee food security, and prevent environmental harms led many critics to challenge the Green Revolution and its successor, the Gene Revolution promised by modern agricultural biotechnology, as continuing impositions of hegemonic Western power and violence on the developing world. 8 Pulling up genetically modified plants from research plots around the world became the modern analogue of an earlier era's smashing of mechanized looms. The instinctive response from governments and their expert advisers, then and now, was to decry these demonstrations as senseless, backward‐looking acts of vandalism. Critics blamed public ignorance of science, radical environmentalism, and media hype—in short anything but a shortfall in democratic institutions—for these demonstrations. Mechanisms for proactively involving an emerging global public in design decisions affecting the majority of the world's population, as in the case of agricultural biotechnology eluded the imagination of ruling elites.

3 The Politics of Standardization

Certain design features are favored more by those in power than others. Chief among these is the strategy of simplification, through which the complex jumble of human identities and behaviors can be rendered, in James Scott's term, “legible” and therefore manageable (Scott 1998) . The instruments most commonly used for this purpose are classification and standardization ( Bowker and Star 1999 ; Desrosières 1998 ). The former sorts things into categories that produce legibility and meaning; the latter ensures that the categories so created are filled with similar entities, permitting valid comparisons and the treatment of like as like. It would be difficult to navigate the social structures of modernity without relying on standard categories defined by technical experts. For anything to circulate productively in the world—persons, goods, currency, services, scientific claims, technological artifacts—people and institutions need to know the exact parameters of what is being exchanged. Equally, standards provide the foundation for building safety and trust, without which one could not effectively operate elaborate, spatially dispersed technological systems. And yet classification and standard‐setting inevitably entail costs: the creation of senseless or meaningless categories, the reduction of complexity, the elimination of ambiguity, and the sometimes forcible pigeonholing of persons and things into categories in which they do not belong (Bauman 1991) .

The relationship between technology and standards has been variously conceived, but whatever the conception the implications are always profoundly political. In technological worlds, humans may become both cognitively and physically the extensions of impersonal machines, with consequent loss of autonomy, individual personality, and freedom of thought and expression. 9 Technologies of mass communication, in particular, not only vastly expand the sphere of public deliberation, but through their power of reproduction actually construct the masses, pressing people into shared and reductive ways of thought ( Lessig 2001 ; Benjamin 1968 ). At the same time, film and more particularly television have privatized the domain of visual expression and communication, disrupting ancient social bonds and promoting the phenomenon that the political scientist Robert Putnam (2000) dubbed “bowling alone.” Yet, for all its alienation and atomization, a public whose members have learned to read and think alike can still be led to destructive ideologies and fundamentalisms. The marriage of state power with print capitalism underpinned, in Benedict Anderson's view, the rise of nationhood as a specific form of “imagined community” with all its potential for destructive mass mobilization (Anderson 1991) .

The social sciences and associated technologies of the modern era are at once a response to and an instrument of state power. Techniques such as cost–benefit analysis and risk assessment permit states to justify actions taken on behalf of their citizens, just as they allow citizens, reciprocally, to hold the state accountable for arbitrary actions ( Porter 1995 ; Jasanoff 1986 ). Through bottom‐up action, citizens may even be able to use social science methods to make their problems visible to otherwise uncaring states (Skocpol 1992) . The objectivity that these methods claim can guard against egregious abuses of authority, and yet as shown through comparative analysis, such objectivity itself is a cultural construct that can clothe exercises of power in a spurious rationality unless its intellectual foundations are available for democratic reexamination and critique (Jasanoff 2005) . Like the mass media, the social sciences, too, have the power to make populations by specifying how to group people into standard categories for the diagnosis and treatment of social ills. As Foucault's writings preeminently demonstrate, the social sciences and technologies serve in this way as the instruments of a new biopower, through which the organization and control of life begin to feature as the stuff of politics (Foucault 1978) . Wielded not only by governments but by other expert state-like institutions, such as hospitals, schools, and prisons these biosciences and biotechnologies transform people's subjective ways of understanding themselves, producing what the philosopher Ian Hacking has called new “social kinds” ( Hacking 1999 ; 1995 ). The eye of external power converges in these institutions with the inner eye of psychological self‐perception to produce, in effect, disciplined and self‐regulating societies.

It is no surprise, then, that in a period of multiple and overlapping standardizations politics frequently takes the form of individuals asserting themselves against political forces that would rather treat them as members of manageable populations. Briefly put, the conflict so posed is between an epidemiological and a clinical gaze: the former operating through statistics, numerical aggregation, formal models, and general patterns of cause and effect; the latter wishing to restore to view the individual, the particular, the non‐repeatable, and the unique ( Desrosières 1998 ; Epstein 1996 ). The locus for such confrontations is often the courts, the only institutions of modernity that routinely hold their doors open for the airing of individual grievances against the objectifying and standardizing impulses of the regulatory state. Yet even here through disputes about the qualifications of experts representing the two standpoints, the imperial, population‐focused, epidemiological gaze has to some degree successfully appropriated the discourse of science as its own, and so has extended its reach at the expense of the humbly clinical (Jasanoff 1995) .

4 The Politics of Ethical Constraint

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein won a new etymological lease on life in the final years of the twentieth century, when British advocacy groups attached the label “frankenfoods” to the products of the new agricultural biotechnologies, thereby implicitly characterizing them as monstrous hybrids unfit for human consumption. Behind the catchy media rhetoric and sometimes lurid imagery, there lurked a growing set of concerns about the ontological implications of the new technologies, particularly those based on the mid‐century revolutions in genetics and molecular biology. Could technology populate the earth with entities we would rather not see proliferate, or even come into being? Could developments against nature still be counted as progress? Almost overnight in the 1990s, especially after the birth of the cloned sheep Dolly, the distinction between the natural and the unnatural became a matter for high politics. Governments of most industrial nations recognized that the legitimacy of their biotechnology policies would depend on navigating that boundary with at least as much circumspection as had previously been invested in decisions about physical safety and risk.

If the politics of risk contains at its core an effort by the state to convert lay citizens to the viewpoint of experts, then the politics of ethical constraint has sought by contrast, to turn lay intuitions into matters of expert judgment. In pursuit of this goal, industrial democracies from the 1980s onward began experimenting with institutions and procedures that would convey formal ethical advice to decision-makers. The appearance of public ethics commissions as a new institutional form provided one salient marker of this development (Jasanoff 2005) . Another was the diversity of procedural formats through which national governments sought to extract ethical intuitions from citizens and translate them into principled bases for formulating law and policy. These experiments with citizen juries, consensus conferences, inquiry commissions, referenda, and ethics councils reached a kind of apogee in 2003 with the UK government's nationwide debate on public attitudes to the commercialization of genetically modified crops. Entitled GM Nation? the event entailed the most comprehensive mobilization of an entire polity ever undertaken around a bioethical question. Differently composed and possessing different formal powers, the varied responses to the problem of bioethics nonetheless had one object in common: they all sought to remove ethical judgment from the domain of the private and the subjective and to transmute ethics itself into a new kind of expertise that states could muster in promoting innovative technologies.

As interesting as the spread of the new expert discourse of bioethics, was the exclusion of some topics from the domain of ethical deliberation. Under US law, for example, intellectual property decisions remained firmly black‐boxed within the technical framework of legal interpretation, resisting attempts to recast decisions about the ownership of biological organisms or materials into the language of ethics. Famously, in its 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty the US Supreme Court ruled that living organisms were patentable under law and that ethical concerns had no place to play in this determination. Manipulation of the human genome and of stem cells taken from embryos aroused enormous passion and generated intense ethical debate in many countries; the manipulation of plant and animal genomes, however, provoked little discussion with rare exceptions, as when the Chicago‐based artist Eduardo Kac inserted a jellyfish gene into a rabbit embryo to make an animal that glowed green under ultra‐violet light. Interesting, too, was the boundary silently drawn between decisions that were felt to be about risk and those that were seen to involve an ethical component. The national bioethics commission appointed by US President Bill Clinton, for instance, could not reach an ethical consensus on the rights and wrongs of human cloning, but it did conclude that cloning “to create a child would be a premature experiment that would expose the fetus and the developing child to unacceptable risks” (NBAC 1997) .

5 Conclusions

Surveying the landscape of democratic politics since the second half of the twentieth century, one must conclude that the genie has definitively escaped from the bottle: technology, once seen as the preserve of dispassionate engineers committed to the unambiguous betterment of life, now has become a feverishly contested space in which human societies are waging bitter political battles over competing visions of the good and the authority to define it. In the process, the virtually automatic coupling of technology with progress, a legacy of the Enlightenment, has come undone. Uncertainty prevails, both about who governs technology and for whose benefit. No matter which way one looks, the frontiers of technology are seen to be at one and the same time, frontiers of politics. Settling these regions—making them at once technically tractable and socially habitable—requires the simultaneous activation of society's cognitive, instrumental, and normative capacities in a complex dynamic of co‐production (Jasanoff 2004) .

Technology as a site and object of politics displays itself clearly in four linked yet separate aspects: as risk; as design; as standard; and as ethical constraint. On each front, as we have seen, politics has played out as a dialectic between competing propositions. In the case of risk, debate has centered on the degree to which technocratic faith in expert assessments or guarantees of safety should take precedence over democratic concerns for institutional accountability and the equitable distribution of technology's burdens and benefits. Controversies over technological design have crystallized around the appropriate timing of public involvement—whether it should be meaningfully participatory, far upstream in the manufacturing process, or rather expressed through resistance after a product or system is already on the market or in the theater of war. Opposition to technology's standardizing logic has pitted the statistician's epidemiological gaze against the clinician's sensitivity to interindividual variability and predilection for case‐centered explanations. And the search for new ethical constraints in the wake of the biological revolution, has activated debates about the right way to draw the boundary between the natural and the unnatural in a period when the stuff of life increasingly also serves as the stuff of politics.

Weaving through all four sites of political engagement is the figure of the technical expert, that invisible yet ubiquitous ordering agent of modernity. In ever expanding areas of governance, it is the expert more than the legislator or the corporate executive who determines how lives should be lived, individually and collectively. The very meaning of democracy, therefore, increasingly hinges on negotiating the limits of the expert's power in relation to that of the publics served by technology. Are experts accountable, to whom, on what authority, and what provision is there for the injection of non‐expert values on matters that fall in the gray zones between conjecture and certainty? By addressing these questions, the politics of technology has tacitly taken up a central challenge of contemporary representative democracy, one left too long untouched by classical political theory.

Two hundred years ago, documents were written that still underpin the legitimacy of modern states. These national constitutions allocated responsibility among the branches of government and specified the protected rights and liberties of individual citizens. They checked untrammeled power and made space for creative fashionings of the self. Today, it is not so much these written texts as the architecture of complex technological systems that performs the constitutional functions of enabling and constraining civilized forms of life—especially on a global scale. By examining the resulting dispensations of artifacts, nature, and society we come closer to understanding how technologies can be scaled to enhance, rather than oppress the human faculties that dreamed them. The politics of technology is the play and the ploy through which today's citizens can assert control over potentially dangerous extensions of their ambitiously inventive selves.

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People think technology impacts politics positively and negatively
For example, social media users are more likely than non-users to say technology has made people more informed about current events in all 11 countries surveyed; more accepting of people with different views in eight countries; and more willing to engage in political debates in nine countries. 10 At the same time, in nine countries a larger ...
Essay on Technology Impact On Politics
500 Words Essay on Technology Impact On Politics Technology: Transforming the Political Landscape. In the realm of politics, technology has emerged as a formidable force, reshaping the way elections are conducted, how leaders communicate with their constituents, and how citizens engage with the political process. From social media to data ...
Technology And Politics Essay Example
The developments in technology that have been embraced by the political class have so far worked for the benefits of the local citizens.In conclusion, in as much as technology and politics are two diverse areas of concentration, we have successfully demonstrated in this paper that the two could actually go together.
Issues on the Frontlines of Technology and Politics
Carnegie's Digital Democracy Network is a diverse group of leading thinkers and activists engaged in work on technology and politics. The network is dedicated to generating original analysis and enabling cross-regional knowledge-sharing to fill critical research and policy gaps.
How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change
Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous ...
PDF DigitalTechnology,Politics,andPolicy-Making
Section 2 focuses on how digital technology has reshaped the flow of political information. In the aftermath of Donald Trump's election in 2016, the perception that social media spread misinformation and increase political polarization has been widely shared. The popularity of someCOVID ...
Digital Technology's Evolving Role in Politics, Protest and Repression
The rapid adoption of digital technologies has fundamentally changed global politics. During the Arab uprisings, experts heralded digital technologies as powerful tools for social change and liberation. A decade later — with global democracy in retreat — the script has flipped and authoritarian governments are on the offensive in deploying digital tools to monitor, track and control their ...
PDF DIGITAL DEMOCRACY How Digital Technology Is Changing Democracy and Its
1.1 Digital technology inﬂuences political mobilization and campaigns Digital technology, including social media and big data, have played a crucial role in US elections since Obama's ﬁrst presidential campaign in 2008 (Wilcox 2008). They change the way political actors mobilize support, as well as the ways citizens participate in politics.
The Future of Digital Spaces and Their Role in Democracy
In the next chapter, there is a collection of responses from technology and academic experts that cover a range of issues tied to online public spaces and are noteworthy for their insights, and for the prominence of the respondents. It closes with two essay-style responses to these questions from internet sages Barry Chudakov and Judith Donath.
40 Technology as a Site and Object of Politics
Abstract. This article analyses the conception of technology as a site and object of politics. It presents four narratives that provide a rationale for a lively politics of technology and each case had given rise to its distinctive conceptual dialectic articulated through specific constellations of political actors, controversies, discourses, and forms of action.