1. Topic
• Technoculture and risk
• Name:- Sejal Chauhan
• Paper:- 8 –The Cultural Studies
• Roll No:- 28
• M.A. Part-1 Sem-2
• Year:-2013-15
• Submitted to:-Smt. S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar University.

2. Technology
Craftsmanship+re
ckoning
Techne:uncoverin
g
Tools,machines,m
aterials and
processes
Technique+word
Technological
determinism or
social
construction?
What is
technoculture?
Techno-

4. -Culture
Cultivation
Culture
and
civilization
Issues in
cultures:
Popular
cultures
Cultural
studies
Cultural
differences
Material
culture

5. CULTURE
Texts Politics Images Meanings Beliefs Artefacts
Practice Professions Age Ritual Subjectivity
Identity Class Nationality Ethnicity Value Sexuality
Gender Institutions
TECHNOLOGY
Tools Machines Materials Processes inputs Outputs
Interfaces Waste State of art Standards Techniques
Training

7. Technoculture and Risk
Contemporary critical theory has had to negotiate
with massive environmental disaster,indutrial
disaster and other cataclysmic events.
Much contemporary social theory examines the role
such events play in culture.
One of the most influential of such theories is that of
the risk society.
For example: -
PC :- Risk+Solution

8. You will discover that PC gives you information on all
the risks involved in using it : virus, ‘illegal operation’,
repeated striking of the shift key, corruption of the
hard drive and so on.
Notice that both risk and solution are embedded in
the same system.
Do you see the use of technology as risky,and that
same technology asks you to buy more protection to
avoid risks?

10. Ulrich Beck propounded the influential ‘risk society’
thesis in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
Risk, Beck inform us, is not real,risk are about ‘becoming
real’.
As soon as risks become real, they cease being risks, and
become, instead, disaster.
Risks then get displayed to other ‘sites’: future disasters.
Thus risks are potential disasters.
We live in an increasingly technologized world.
Global capitalism the immediate geopolitical context of
our nation states runs on the engines of information and
communications technologies.
Our everyday life from shopping to education depends
heavily on technology,with greater or lesser of both
efficiency and necessity.

11. • Beck begins by ‘suggesting that technoscience in
industrial society has generated numerous dangers.
• Industrial society is based on the production and
distribution of goods which are required to fill the
‘scarcity’ within society.
• Society is based on scarcity and the removal of
scarcity can handle goods and needs only when they
catualize, as ‘visible’.
• Such a system can not handle the risks and hazards
of industrial production and dustribution.
• But as long as risk is secondary to scarcity or needs
industrial society has no problems.

12. • In other words, risk generates solution which
generate more risk.
• Individualized beings experience newer forms of
insecurity and anxieties.
• We have here culture of warnings – in banks railway
coaches , malls, in fact any place you go discover
warning against all sort of dangers and risks.

13. • Van Loon argues that this risk information is not only
produced by science and governance, but also by
commerce.
• Each of the above objects can be made safe, and the
‘safety’ lies in acquiring newer merchandized
products.
• The very technological systems geared towards
greater security and safety, instill greater risk
sensibilities: we become increasingly anxious about
potential threats to our health and safety precisely
when we are fed information from technologies.
• The McAfee antivirus scanning software that runs
with ‘hotmail’ warns us: ‘Don’t become a statistic’,
and tells us exactly what could go wrong with virus
infection of our PCs.

14.  with increasing and easier access to information and the
risk of releasing confidential information – ex : credit
cards numbers and residential address by children via the
Internet have both in creased considerably.
Such technologies engender risks while simultaneously
providing solutions to such risks.
Risk thus generates commerce via a surfeit of
information about risk.
 Thus, when technoscience reveals the risk involved in
contamination and other newer problems which were
previously unknown, it also delivers information about
these risks like what are the possible effects/dangers of
certain objects/events such as bacteria or genetic
defects.

15. Then it reprodused the risks by making us aware of
these risks.
 Thus Risk theory for Cultural Studies reveals the
extent that society/ culture thrives on risk, providing
information about risk potential, possible solutions
and so on .
Risk theory reflects on the psycho-social impact of
technoculture where cultural responses to new
devices are based upon an awareness that they
create new risks.

17. Thank you