ENGAGING IN CRITICAL READING : A GUIDE USING LANGDON WINNER, " DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?
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What this Guide Contains
This Guide contains guidelines on critical reading and specific questions that can be
asked as you read Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts have Politics?”
Some of you will already have cultivated critical reading skills, others will need to develop
them as we go. ...
engaging in critical reading a guide using langdon winner
do artifacts have politics
what this guide contains this guide contains guidelines on critical reading and specific questions that
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ENGAGING Engaging in Critical
IN CRITICAL READING Reading: A Guide
: A GUIDE using
USING
LANGDON Langdon
WINNER,Winner, “Do Artifacts
" DO ARTIFACTS have
HAVE Politics?”
POLITICS?"
_____________________________________________________________________________________
What this Guide Contains
This Guide contains guidelines on critical reading and specific questions that can be
asked as you read Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts have Politics?”
Some of you will already have cultivated critical reading skills, others will need to develop
them as we go. Always, you will do some “customizing” to make the process work for you.
We will use Langdon Winner’s article as the example, so even if you’re feeling confident
about your critical reading abilities, you may find some advantage to the handout.
Some Guidance for Critical Reading1
Reading articles for this course is unlike textbook reading. In textbook reading, your main
goal is to understand the concept. That’s important for acquiring technical knowledge. In
this course, our goal is not only to understand but also to critique. The articles here are not
chosen so that you accept what they say as “true”, but so that you wrestle with the ideas. In
fact, your instructors do not necessarily agree with these articles, but we do find them
worth wrestling with as we try to gain a deeper understanding of interaction between
society, technology, and the environment.
Critical reading can be done in four main steps:
1. Pre-reading—the stage at which you frame your understanding of the reading
2. Skimming for content and Structure—a stage of making a quick pass through the
document to get a gist of what is important and where it is going
3. Reading for understanding—this is the most time consuming stage where you read,
make notes, and get the substance of the argument
4. Developing a response—as you read (and after) you need to consider how the ideas fit
with what you already know, what you might find challenging, what might need further
kinds of evidence or argument to be persuasive.
1. Pre-Reading
In first year, you should have learned to use the “CRAAP Test” to evaluate sources.2 That
test offers a first step in pre-reading to prepare you to get the most out of an article (as well
as being a good way to assess articles in doing research). As you look at the Winner article,
what key points related to CRAAP do you notice?
Second, try looking up the author in Google. When you google Langdon Winner, have a
quick look at what he’s done, where he is a professor, and what his expertise is. Does that
give you confidence or reluctance as you read the article?
Third, consider your own attitudes. Even before you try to read this article, what are your
thoughts about the question in the title? What are you expecting? The article is 15 pages,
how long will you allow to read it?
1 UTSC offers advice on critical reading that forms the basis of this guide. You can find their guide here.
2 You can find The U of T Library’s guide to the CRAAP test here.
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, 2. Skimming for Content and Structure
Skimming through a reading is actually a strategic skill. First, you need to read a little to
know what you’re skimming for. (And to be honest, this article is not the easiest to skim.)
An article that is easy to skim has meaningful headings that can give us a quick sense of
how the article works and what it will talk about.
Using the First Paragraph
Read the first paragraph in its entirety. It often provides good guidance to what we can
expect in the reading as a whole. Note: this is less true in book chapters (and some of our
readings are book chapters) because book structure counts on you getting some context
from the introduction and previous chapters. However, read the first paragraph of Winner;
it does give some key points:
• He thinks he has a controversial idea. Do you agree?
• He thinks machines need to be considered not just for their operations, or even just for
their impacts on the environment but for their ways of embodying political power. What
does that mean to you?
By reading the first paragraph you already get a sense of what is going to be discussed in
the article as a whole. Introductions are important. Notice, too, that for each bullet, I have
raised a “response” question. That’s an important habit of mind to develop as you read.
The two I ask here—namely “do you agree?” and “what does that mean to you?”—focus on
two aspects of critical reading:
• The first has to do with our cognitive biases. If I can identify right away that I am
positive, neutral, or negative toward a controversial idea then I can begin to prepare
myself to receive the ideas in a most honest fashion. Failing to recognize my own biases
might make me toss aside an article because it is “difficult”, when really what bothers
me is that it is contrary to my beliefs or understanding of the world.
• The second question focuses attention on integrating understanding. If I can determine
how the point works with what I already know, or with my prior beliefs, then I am in a
better position to get the most out of the reading, and to evaluate it.
Skimming Headings
Many articles will have useful headings. You can skim headings or first paragraphs of
sections and get a pretty quick overview of the whole article. Actually, this is true for the
other reading from week 1 of the course: Neil Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know
About Technological Change.” Unfortunately, Winner’s article makes our job more difficult.
Not only does it have few headings—fewer than I would like—but they are not especially
informative unless you have already done some other work to understand the article.
Skimming Topic Sentences
To skim an article effectively, you need to read the first sentences of paragraphs—often
these will be topic sentences. If you don’t worry too much about getting any detail, you can
often discover quickly how an article works.
Let’s consider a few of the first sentences in Winner’s article:
Paragraph 2: “Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago,
Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme,
arguing that …”
The sentence goes on, but this is enough to see that Winner is doing two things:
• he is putting his work in context of a broader discussion of other writers and time—we
might need to trust that Winner is using these writers fairly. If we were going to be
ruthless critical readers we might check up on some. (We don’t expect that here.)
Rev. 1.0 Page 2 of 5
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