When analyzing the text (“Do artifacts have politics”) by Langdon Winner, it primarily led me to believe that this was a complex claim worth discussing. From what I can understand from the article, Winner’s main claim is that artifacts such as “technologies and society” have a political value. Winner makes this claim when he includes the example of Robert Moses and his political attribution to the city of New York. Winner argued, based upon stories, that Moses’ racist politics led him to create shorter overpasses so that buses (filled with minorities) could not reach those sides of town. Further, Winner ultimately believes that attaching politics to artifacts is unavoidable. This is apparent when he writes,
“According to this view, the adoption of a given technical
system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that
have a distinctive political cast – for example, centralized or decentralized,
egalitarian or inegalitarian, repressive or liberating” (Winner, 33).
Additionally, another quote that stood out to me was when Winner suggested,
“The idea we must now examine and evaluate is that certain kinds of technology do not allow such flexibility, and that to choose them is
to choose a particular form of political life…” (Winner, 33).
I have never thought of artifacts and/or technology as having political meaning. Some of the claims Winner makes in this article make sense, however, I still would like to understand more. I think that his main argument was clear but the article was very challenging for me to comprehend, so I was only able to pick out the main claims. I think I have many questions but am unsure where to begin.
However, I can agree that we see political attachment to artifacts in media. Today it seems that everything has political value, whether we mean for it to or not. Tweets, articles, Facebook posts, Buzzfeed quizzes, and even music all hold some sort of political aspect. I think that the media is constantly highlighting all of the various ways technology or artifacts hold such political attachments.
In Werry’s text, “Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Online Communities in Business Texts,” I was very impressed. It was very interesting to read the take of online communities and how they related to business in the 1990’s because everything is much more advanced now. I would rate this paper an A because of its’ organization and strong claims.
Caitlyn Bettenhausen 
I guess politics really do run our country, your insights were good and I also don’t understand much about the issue but know it’s a problem. I think the main reason platform cultures like reddit have their own mini platforms within the platform to attempt to avoid politics, but it is usually not the case.
I was also impressed with Dr. Werry’s text, and must admit that I also gave him a perfect score. I had misunderstood the claims until we talked about what Dr. Werry meant in class, such as how I found myself not actively doing much to bring in change, which was not the intention in the paper. I also found useful how to find the designs of websites in previous years through the lecture!
LikeLike