Power and Technology

Book excerpt: The notion of technological power is fast becoming an object of both academic and policy discourses. Within such discourses one can observe several different senses of power being employed, especially when viewed from a multi-disciplinary angle. This demonstrates the need for the creation of a cross-disciplinary and integrative framework for identifying and clarifying different conceptions of the relations between technology and power. In this respect, the book aims to offer an empirically-informed philosophical framework for understanding the technological construction of power, which allows for a differentiated vocabulary for describing various senses of technological power, while bridging together social and political theory, critical studies of technology, philosophy and ethics of technology. In addition, the framework presented in this book aims to contribute to better critical and ethical evaluation of technologies and their powers. Any adequate ethics or critique of technology must be based on a better, clearer, and more nuanced and differentiated understanding of the many ways in which technology can be described as ‘powerful’.