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 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 Reading 1 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. That 2 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? UTSC offers advice on critical reading that forms the basis of this guide. You can find their guide here. 1 You can find The U of T Library’s guide to the CRAAP test here. 2 Rev. 1.0 Page 1 of 5 This study source was downloaded by from CourseH on :12:47 GMT -05:00 ENGAGING IN CRITICAL READING : A GUIDE USING LANGDON WINNER, " DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?" 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 This study source was downloaded by from CourseH on :12:47 GMT -05:00 • he says this is “classic” and “one version” of an argument about the ways in which technology embodies politics. That should tell us that a) there are other versions, and b) they won’t be as “classic”. In this context, “classic” is a little difficult to understand but it probably means something like “widely accepted in the field.” Paragraph 3: “An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems.” In this paragraph, we should probably expect something about supporters of “large-scale high-technology systems.” That’s enough for us now. We get the idea of the controversy. For skimming, that’s sufficient. Paragraph 5: “Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.” Notice that for this paragraph, I needed to read into the second sentence to get the gist of what the paragraph would be about. Here, he is stating “stern advice”—a caution to people doing exactly what he’s doing. So, we should be able to see that he is working with counterclaims and opposition. For that reason, this paragraph is probably important. At this point, you should be able to continue reading topic sentences and form both your questions and some ideas about where you want to look more closely. Watch for Organizational Signals Organizational signals are often just words such as “first” and “second” or “however” and “therefore.” Those “signpost” words warn us to pay attention. As I skim an article, looking at the topic sentences, I will also try to watch for this kind of word. Alternatively, you can do a “Control F” search for the words. These words are useful to help us understand how a writer is presenting the logic of their ideas. Winner has a significant use of this structure on p.123. Here’s the relevant topic sentence for the paragraph: In what follows I shall offer outlines and illustrations of two ways in wh