Matching Items (17)
Description
Science fiction themed video games, specifically Role Playing Games (RPGs) like Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR), that focus on an emerging technology, contain features that help to better inform anticipatory governance. In a game like DX:HR, players vicariously experience human-enhancement technology and its societal effects through their in-game character. Acting as the character, the player explores the topic of human-enhancement technology in various ways, including dialogue with non-player characters (NPCs) and decisions that directly affect the game's world. Because Deus Ex: Human Revolution and games similar to it, allow players to explore and think about the technology itself, the stances on it, and its potential societal effects, they facilitate the anticipatory governance process. In this paper I postulate a theory of anticipatory gaming, which asserts that video games inform the anticipatory governance process for an emerging technology. To demonstrate this theory I examine the parts of the anticipatory governance process and demonstrate RPG's ability to inform it, through a case study of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
ContributorsShedd, Jesse Bernard (Author) / Wetmore, Jameson (Thesis director) / Fisher, Erik (Committee member) / McKnight, John Carter (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
The purpose of this project was to document and explain what and why the 2014 School of Human Evolution and Social Change study abroad group experienced what they did in Fiji. Fiji is a third world country and it lacks important infrastructure that prevents many in Fiji form accessing basic medical supplies and medical treatment. Lack of infrastructure and, therefore, medical access and supplies is a result of the tumultuous ethnopolitical atmosphere that prevails in Fiji. Living with the Fijian locals in Votua Village made their struggle personal to the study abroad group. As a result, the group returned inspired to US determined to make an impact on the people that had made such a lasting impact on them. A new campus organization was created and nearly $4,600 was raised in order to help provide medical aid to the villagers in Fiji. The student's reaction in Fiji was westernized, but the program is not a complete and utter failure; students work directly with the villagers to acquire items they actually need. This ensures little waste and that the money collected is used efficiently. However, the student's project is not entirely sustainable; the implementation of the Funds For Fiji response has the potential to create lasting, unintended consequences. To make the program more sustainable, students need to figure out a way to broaden project involvement and to broaden the scope of the project to impact more people on the island of Fiji. Video Link https://youtu.be/9asWtj1u2BQ
ContributorsHowell, Colby Lee (Author) / Wetmore, Jameson (Thesis director) / Eder, James (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Concerns about the environmental and social impacts of anthropogenic climate change have called into question the efficacy, efficiency, and equity of energy systems. People committed to renewable energy transitions, and those who defend fossil-based systems, are simultaneously envisioning energy futures and seeking to build them. In the process, they are changing both energy technologies and how social life is organized around them. In this dissertation, I examine how ideas and materialities around distributed solar power become inscribed into energy policies, etched into urban landscapes, and embedded into city life. These processes engender particular kinds of embodied communities, which I define as solar communities. I study the visual and affective dimensions of emerging solar communities in Arizona and Italy using the qualitative methods of semi-structured interviews, photo-documentation, and observation. The dissertation consists of three papers. In Chapter 2, I explore how rooftops are constructed as newly productive sites for electricity generation through economic, legal, cartographic, and political negotiations, and how they become sites of struggle over who has access to them. I describe a case study in Phoenix about a proposed change in compensation for residential rooftop solar customers and the affective dynamics of a protest around it. In Chapter 3, I examine how a variety of photovoltaic applications are appearing in urban landscapes in Treviso, Italy and Flagstaff, Arizona. I investigate how aesthetic and environmental values are imbued in the physical forms those installations ultimately take, and the role that in/visibility plays in shaping these decisions. I use photography to document these emergent solar communities and argue that there is value to seeing photovoltaics in your city. In Chapter 4, I describe a workshop I led on the human dimensions and ethical trade-offs of renewable energy transitions using interactive activities and case studies from Ethiopia and Appalachia. I show how decisions about energy transitions have far-reaching impacts on people’s lives, health, the way they work, and geopolitical relationships. Together, these chapters begin to form a picture of the governance around, and visuality of, photovoltaic designs that emerge as fixtures of both landscape and society, which in turn inform solar communities.
ContributorsFuller, Jennifer Lynn (Author) / Miller, Clark A (Thesis advisor) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Graffy, Elisabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation examines the efforts of the Carnegie Image Tube Committee (CITC), a group created by Vannevar Bush and composed of astronomers and physicists, who sought to develop a photoelectric imaging device, generally called an image tube, to aid astronomical observations. The Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism coordinated the CITC, but the committee included members from observatories and laboratories across the United States. The CITC, which operated from 1954 to 1976, sought to replace direct photography as the primary means of astronomical imaging.
Physicists, who gained training in electronics during World War II, led the early push for the development of image tubes in astronomy. Vannevar Bush’s concern for scientific prestige led him to form a committee to investigate image tube technology, and postwar federal funding for the sciences helped the CITC sustain development efforts for a decade. During those development years, the CITC acted as a mediator between the astronomical community and the image tube producers but failed to engage astronomers concerning various development paths, resulting in a user group without real buy-in on the final product.
After a decade of development efforts, the CITC designed an image tube, which Radio Corporation of American manufactured, and, with additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the committee distributed to observatories around the world. While excited about the potential of electronic imaging, few astronomers used the Carnegie-developed device regularly. Although the CITC’s efforts did not result in an overwhelming adoption of image tubes by the astronomical community, examining the design, funding, production, and marketing of the Carnegie image tube shows the many and varied processes through which astronomers have acquired new tools. Astronomers’ use of the Carnegie image tube to acquire useful scientific data illustrates factors that contribute to astronomers’ adoption or non-adoption of those new tools.
Physicists, who gained training in electronics during World War II, led the early push for the development of image tubes in astronomy. Vannevar Bush’s concern for scientific prestige led him to form a committee to investigate image tube technology, and postwar federal funding for the sciences helped the CITC sustain development efforts for a decade. During those development years, the CITC acted as a mediator between the astronomical community and the image tube producers but failed to engage astronomers concerning various development paths, resulting in a user group without real buy-in on the final product.
After a decade of development efforts, the CITC designed an image tube, which Radio Corporation of American manufactured, and, with additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the committee distributed to observatories around the world. While excited about the potential of electronic imaging, few astronomers used the Carnegie-developed device regularly. Although the CITC’s efforts did not result in an overwhelming adoption of image tubes by the astronomical community, examining the design, funding, production, and marketing of the Carnegie image tube shows the many and varied processes through which astronomers have acquired new tools. Astronomers’ use of the Carnegie image tube to acquire useful scientific data illustrates factors that contribute to astronomers’ adoption or non-adoption of those new tools.
ContributorsThompson, Samantha Michelle (Author) / Ellison, Karin (Thesis advisor) / Wetmore, Jameson (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / DeVorkin, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In this dissertation, I explore the possibility of Latin American Futurism/s because Latin American visions of the future are primarily absent from the global conversation of alternative or counter futures. In three chapters, I expose three interrelated yet methodologically different approaches to understanding the emerging phenomenon of Latin American Futurism/s: A exploration of the connections between notions of visions of technology/futures for El Salvador's Bitcoin and South Cone's robots, the experiences and practices of local future-makers and their communities; and artifacts that characterize expressions of regional futuring. To comprehend the region's technological paradigms, I offer these socio-technical accounts of Future-making and Future-knowledge for/from Latin America as a geo-political region. Each element contributes, with its different interdisciplinary perspective, to characterizing "Latin American Futurism/s" as a form of technological rationality and regional futuring as an expression of shared paradigms about science and technology. These characterizations allow for an appreciation of the paradigms, strategies, and artifacts that configure domestic and professional futurity in Latin America, focusing on its objects and visions as mediators and sense-makers of what ought to come. In this manuscript, I offer a characterization of Latin American futurism/s to facilitate its recognition and understanding and to put in value the production of forward-oriented knowledge produced by people thinking and living in Latin America.
ContributorsPérez Comisso, Martín Andrés (Author) / Smith, Lindsay A (Thesis advisor) / Keeler, Lauren W (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Michael G (Committee member) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Technology and society co-exist, influencing each other simultaneously and iteratively, in ways that are sufficiently interdependent that it can be hard to see where one ends and the other begins. A set of sociotechnical relations exist between and across society and technologies that structure the ways that people live and work. What happens to sociotechnical relations when technologies are introduced or changed? In this dissertation, I argue that key parts of the processes that link technological and social change occur in a liminal space between the invention of new technologies and their widespread adoption and integration in society. In this space, engineers, businesses, and users of new technologies imagine, explore, develop, and test new ways of weaving together technology and society in novel sociotechnical arrangements. I call this space between invention and adoption a testbed, which I theorize as an early phase of technological deployment where outcomes are explored and tested, and sociotechnical assemblages are imagined, assembled, evaluated, and stabilized. I argue that the testbed, which is often delimited in both time and location, should be understood, interrogated, and governed appropriately to anticipate and examine the possibilities of social disruption inherent in technological change and to design the relationships between technology and society to improve sociotechnical outcomes. To understand the testbed, I engage in a case study of the Arizona public autonomous vehicle testbed, leveraging a multi-method approach that includes public observations, interviews, a survey, and content analyses. Through this work, I analyze diverse aspects of the testbed and articulate how the work of testbed actors imagines, assembles, tests, and stabilizes sociotechnical assemblages and futures. The dissertation builds on the insights gained from this investigation to evaluate the testbed and develop recommendations about assessing the space between technology invention and widespread adoption. Ultimately, this dissertation concludes that testbeds are key places where futures get made and so should be given greater attention by theorists of innovation and by societies confronting the societal and ethical challenges posed by new technologies.
ContributorsRadatz, Alecia (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
There is a lack of prior research about factors and conditions relating to the underdevelopment of infrastructure on Navajo Nation, especially from a community-centered perspective. As a Diné researcher, the intersection created via the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), American Indian Studies (AIS), and Diné Studies creates a means by which developmental policy and futures planning can be discussed. Through qualitative inquiry, specifically cross-case analysis, oral histories, and archival review from a Diné perspective, this work establishes the relationship between roads, energy, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the Navajo Nation in relation to the historical underdevelopment of infrastructure on the reservation, especially from 2000 to 2020. Roads and energy infrastructures make way for ICT deployments, and together, these three infrastructures shape futures planning for the Nation, including governance decisions relating to partnerships, and internal versus external development. Relationships between infrastructural efforts, past colonial practices of the United States (U.S.), and relations between the U.S. and tribes during this era shape the development of relevant expertise within Navajo Nation entities and also impact access to and uses of significant funding opportunities available via the early 21st century American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A Diné-centered concept of care through long-term infrastructure deployment relates tribal sovereignty and Indigenous ways of knowing to Indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS) and suggests new directions for applied Diné studies in the field of Indigenous STS.
ContributorsGeorge, Alaina Sarah (Author) / Duarte, Marisa E (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023