Critical Discourse Studies and Technology: A Multimodal Approach to Analyzing Technoculture

Description

Making a new contribution to the developing field of multimodal critical discourse studies, Ian Roderick–s book demonstrates how technologies that tend to be widely represented as innovative, or as simple pragmatic solutions, are always anchored in power relations and are therefore deeply ideological. A series of examples analysing technologies such as robotics, smart phones or bio-medicine, their functioning and uses, as well as their representations in the media, show that these are embedded within discourses that tell us about social and power relations, identities and political values. The book takes a tour of everyday technologies and how they are represented in different settings. A Disney theme park attraction showing how technology has improved family life makes many assumptions about what is natural in terms of interpersonal relations, pleasure and satisfaction. Advertisements that represent robot workers inform us about the kinds of worker-management relations now characterising work places. Roderick looks at the way that technologies, while often represented as divorced from their production and maintenance, as objects of wonder, need to be seen within a fabric of social relations that tends to be supressed from how we see them as part of a wider technological fetishism. Engaging with existing theories of technology, the book argues that we must take a more interdisciplinary approach to avoid the pitfalls of social constructivism and technological determinism. Our experiences of technologies are shaped through the relationship between knowledge, practices and institutional forms. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction A brief comment on terminology Chapter contents Chapter 1 Defining technology: Technology as apparatus The dualist view The individuation of technical objects The associated milieu The drone as a technical object Defining technology as apparatus Conclusion  Chapter 2 Multimodal critical discourse analysis Discourse: A social semiotic approach Semiotic resourcefulness in communication Mode and metafunction Multimodal discourse and the process of resemiotization Conclusion Chapter 3 Analyzing multimodal discourse: A toolkit approach The critical in (multimodal) critical discourse analysis Description as a tool of critique Lexical and iconographic choice Connotation Metaphor Transitivity analysis Social actors Social action Interaction analysis Modality Typography Layout Conclusion Chapter 4 Discourses of technology as progress Progress as betterment American progress and the vector of improvement Bringing progress into the home Progress today Conclusion Chapter 5 Discourses of technological determinism Technological determinism and causality Technology as destruction Technology as revolution There’ll always be a technical solution Technological determinism and technocratic discourse Conclusion Chapter 6 Discourses of technological fetishism: (Over)valuing technologies The technological sublime Conceptualizing fetishism Robots as technological fetish Representing Actors and (Re)Allocating Agency Misrepresenting robotic agency? The fetish value of robots The EOD fetish and its associated milieu  Conclusion Chapter 7 Discourses of technological (dis)satisfaction: Consuming technologies This technology is for you, personally Me and my robot Robots failing miserably in the world of work Robots as agents Robots as affective bodies Do robots dream of precarious labor? Conclusion Conclusion Notes Chapter 1 Chapter 3 Glossary Bibliography Index