Blog Post #2--Techno-science shaping lives (ours, for example). Due Saturday 3rd @ 11:59 PM; comment by Sunday 4th @ 11:59PM

Tell a story—about techno-science shaping your life—and use our work so far to make sense of it.  Take both 'techno-science' and 'shaping your life' however you need to to make it interesting (to you and us all)


Like What? Thinking back, I (Robin) realized that I was a fidgity, loud, easily distracted (Oooo! A shiny thing….!) non-punctual, chaotic kid. The nuns in elementary school knew exactly what I was: 'an ill-behaved child' who was not 'working up to his potential.'  The appropriate treatment was time-outs, notes-to-mom, and occasional paddling. Today, I would be diagnosed ADHD and probably treated with Ritalin or Adderal. And the nuns can't paddle (by law). My life would have been different, for sure, but who knows how?

In High School, we heard all the time about who was and who wasn't 'college material.' My SAT scores proved that I was 'college material,' and I went to college (in spite of erratic and crappy grades).

This is science at work, naming, categorizing, measuring, offering stories, diagnosing, and thus creating ('making up' or 'constructing') things like bad kid / ADHD kid or 'college material.'  Like all constructions, they're absolutely 'real'; these decisions and labels have consequences; shape lives.

'Sir Francis Ford's children giving a coin to a beggar.'
1789.  London:  Tate Gallery.

Carl Elliot would help by framing historically-local 'disorders,' and talking about the 'semantic contagion' involved in lots of 'direct-to-consumer' drug ads, and lots of articles about ADHD and child-rearing.  Pinker would look to my genes (and my OC father and alcoholic but literate parents). Lewontin would insist that naming a kid 'disordered' (or not) changes him or her, and that the diagnoses mirror and legitimate already-present societal beliefs. Just like the way Dickens writes up Oliver Twist and 'The Artful Dodger' mirrors and confirms a belief that the poor are — well — just inferior to us wealthy folks by nature. And more exciting: that the labels then act to shape the person, whose behavior greatly effects whether and how his or her genes get passed on: 'constructivism.'

And most useful, maybe, might be Latour's account of the ways instruments — 'devices for seeing' (his Topofil, Munsell color code, technical names like 'sandy loam,' maps, theories etc.) literally make the mud and worms of Amazonia into 'facts' and data that can move around, that can be talked about, that take on scientific reality.  The DSM criteria that define a psychological  'disorder' also make it.  Terms like ADHD or SAT scores don't simply refer to some neurological pattern in Robin's head (and body).  They construct Robin (and all his fidgety friends, some of whom went to college).

Robin finds he's not going to die of prostate cancer--maybe.  And that he became (by definition) less manly in 2010, because testosterone / PSA levels just 'naturally' decline with age.  It's a fact.

So really:  how did techno-science construct you (or your family, friends or the world you live in)? 

Let your Science and Culture friends know about you. And explain some science-in-action.  
Use our readings to frame and illuminate. All of them, including Brave new world, say — if reading it brought the power and danger of 'science' into focus for you.

Concepts and Issues—from our Keywords and readings (some of many; might help):

Big Ones: All societies have always had 'theories' of Human Nature (science) and these are active in creating specific Political Systems (politics). Always intertwined.

• boundary work (ways science limits, defines, circumscribes)
• naming (and all the other forms of what we'd now call 'circulating reference') 
• conditions / disorders (and diagnoses, treatments)
• instruments / seeing devices / (tests, surgeries, therapies, names-and-definitions, measuring and seeing instruments, ways of talking or writing, maybe even novels and other 'art')
• 'blank slate' (or tabula rasa)
• 'ghost in the machine' (our friend the self or soul)
• noble savages or states of nature
• sociobiology or evolutionary psychology (as disciplines)
• neuroscience / cognitive science (also disciplines—CF: 'boundary work')
• legitimation (ways that science 'makes things so,' as Jean-Luk would say).  If the College Board says you're smart, well, then you are.)
• fact-making and social construction (with all its problems)
• semantic contagion (lots us now have gluten sensitivity — because we know how to 'test' for it, and Dr. Oz did a show on it)