Lecture notes
Lecture notes Crime and Technology (SOC2066)
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- University Of Surrey (UNIS)
Providing in-depth analysis and documentation for the whole of second-year lecture notes in the module Crime and Technology.
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Crime and Technology SOC2066Week 1 - Lecture
28/10
Cybercrime – fundamentally dependent upon technology
Social Media – enable and control crime
CCTV – the behaviour towards CCTV
DNA – fundamental in trial
Police Radios, Tasers etc – enable non-lethal force
Databases – i.e. bank details provide criminal evidence
Will be analysing:
1. Information technologies e.g. facial recognition
2. Chemical, biological & atomic technologies
3. Transport technologies
4. Weapons technologies e.g. knife crime
How are they being misused and regulated?
Fundamental to the CJS!!;
Tagging
DNA testing
Lie detectors – reliable?
Tasers – safe?
Internet filters
How do we define technology crime?
Michael McGuire – Technology, Crime and Justice
Lecture 2 - Technology: From Ancient to Modern
5/10
Promethean themes (ancient Greek)
Fire (privileged resource) was supplied by Prometheus were ‘technologies’ to help humans ‘do things
better’ – so was technology acquired through a primal act of deviance?? Theft??
Is human’s relationship with technology ‘criminal’ from the beginning? Does it imply we should be
punished?
Techne – Ancient world technology
Associated with post-industrial period
High vs Low technology
Premodern or preindustrial?
What is classed as technology?
, Agriculture?
A spoon?
Language?
Science?
Plato – Techne and poiesis (skill, craft which is revealed)
Aristotle – Technology “imitates nature”, it completes certain aims and helps nature. Technology
needs to be created as they lack the ‘source of their production’; this distinguishes them from
natural objects.
The Industrial Revolution (18th century)
Mechanisation and mass production (underpins everything today)
New transport, communication, power
Contemporary CJS; prison system, forensics, identification etc
Critical Views on Technology
1. Keats (The Romantics) expressed concerns about impact of technology on environment and
exploiting nature.
2. Worker resistance (e.g. the luddites)
3. Mixed opinions – Marx
4. The benefits for those privileged who use it for non-societal benefits (The Frankfurt School
etc)
Contemporary Theories of Technology
Instrumentalism – believed technology is a natural tool, an inert artefact waiting to be used by
humans.
Ambivalence about technology’s ethical and moral significance
HOW we use it is more important…
Substantive vs the Instrumentalist view
If technology is a neutral instrument; can there really be technology crime?
Heidegger’s Phenomenological View – ‘Questions Concerning Technology’ (1954)
Described WWII as “the confrontation of European humanity with global technology”
Rejected ‘instrumentalism’ – favoured the ‘phenomenological’ view
“The essence of technology is not technological”
Waterwheel (pre-industrial attitude) harmony to let the world be vs (contemporary)
destructive hydro-electric power station
Posthumanism – Haraway, Latour & Deleuze
Humans and technology are linked in various ways
We are collective actors, Latour calls fusion between humans and technology “actants”
We must consider all the technological factors that go into the end product
Haraway – we are hybrids due to increasing interdependence on technology e.g. artificial
limbs, pacemakers, glasses etc (fused your body with plastic – the cyborg)
, Deleuze – machines are functional systems e.g. breast feeding is machinelike or womb
(reproductive machine)
Technology… Extension in Capacity? – Lapp, Freud & McLuhan
Lapp – efficient technologies resemble our physical organs (cup)
Freud – technology is prosthetics (additional limbs)
McLuhan ‘Influential Theories of Media’ – technologies extend the human body e.g. the
wheel = the foot. THIS MEANS TECHNOLOGY ‘AMPUTATES’ THOSE PARTS OF US TOO.
(Amputates: our connection to nature, privacy etc)
Double edged sword.
Obvious connection to the social world and able to be a source of crime.
Technology:
‘A force for good’?
Better health, longer life, feeds poor etc
Or ‘a force for bad’?
Destroys the planet, removes jobs, facilitates violence, reduces intelligence etc…
Lecture 3 - 12/10
Pre-industrial Crime, Technology & Control
Is technology crime and control often related to ‘high’ technologies?
The industrial revolution was a changing point in the relationship between technology, crime and
control.
Pre-industrial Technologies and Deviance
Law breaking vs crime… e.g. insulting the gods in Athens = execution
Force: Violence, physical/sexual assault (much more common pre-industrial)
Most pre-modern murders are ‘technology assisted’?
1. Weapons Tech – stabbing, strangulation, battering etc
2. Communications/distance technology – bow&arrow, slings, chariots etc
3. Bio-chemical Technologies – poison, widely used; (Roman civilization had “Lex Cornelia” laws
against poisoning by 82 BCE)
Force = Theft
Technologies such as the iron bar
Transportation Systems: the highwayman, pirate: ‘technology created opportunity’.
Fraud and deception – language (lies)? Technology crimes date from even earlier!!
1. Forging handwritten documents
2. False seals
3. Counterfeiting coins (development of printing)
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