Technik
Refine
Document Type
- Journal Article (5) (remove)
Language
- English (5) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (5)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (5)
In the 1980s, when computers became affordable for private households, a hacker or cracking scene, which was the term used by members of this subculture, developed in several western and northwestern European countries. These (almost exclusively male) groups of adolescents ‘cracked’, copied and exchanged computer games. On the basis of magazines and published interviews with former members of this scene, this article shows how cracking became an important current in the broad spectrum of teenage subculture – with specific ethical codes and rituals of masculinity. Its members were by no means lone specialists who eschewed contact with the outside world, but rather developed their own forms of community and communication. This scene did not construe itself as a political counter-culture; it was rather part of the diversifying popular and consumer culture of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, when law enforcing agencies began to prosecute software piracy more resolutely, this computer subculture began to fade. However, it lived on in the field of computer graphics, in electronic music and in the growing IT sector.
By the late 1970s, it was technologically possible to manufacture microcomputers – very small, stand-alone computers for personal use – in very large quantities. Selling them, however, meant creating a mass market where none existed: conventionally, only trained professionals, and a few devoted enthusiasts, interacted directly with the machines. Designers, marketers, retailers and other promoters therefore sought to build meanings into the design and presentation of computers which would connect them with new audiences. Such meanings reflected – and might themselves modify – the prevalent hopes, fears, desires and expectations of the users’ cultures.
Since the 1950s, cycling policy in China has gone through three phases: from active encouragement (1955–1994) and systematic discouragement (1994–2008) to neglect and ambivalence (since the 2010s). Parallel to the expansion of automobility, the country has been unique in its development of innovations in electric-powered two-wheelers and a vibrant e-cycling practice since the 1980s. Electric bikes have given over 300 million low-status commuters and peddlers access to jobs and housing, even though planners have dismissed them as a problematic ›floating population‹ and remnants of the past. Given China’s current urban sustainable mobility challenges and ambition to become the world’s first ›Ecological Civilization‹ (2013), China’s bicycle industry, e-vehicle manufacturers, and the e-commerce sector may offer an alternative to the US-based ›car civilization‹ if ecological (e-cycles) and social (low-status workers) sustainability are brought into one analytical frame.
Access Activism. The Politicization of Wheelchairs and Wheelchair Users in the Twentieth Century
(2022)
For millions of disabled people around the world the wheelchair has been one of the most important technological innovations of the twentieth century. From its inception as a relatively cumbersome, heavy machine, designed principally for indoor use, the wheelchair has evolved into a sophisticated and highly technical mode of transport. Wheelchairs are, at least in the Global North, relatively widely used and universally recognizable – so recognizable that they have become the cultural symbol to represent all disabled people. Wheelchairs are often viewed with trepidation: as machines that disable, confine, and deprive their occupant of independence – as medical devices that doctors prescribe only to the sick, the wounded or the elderly. Such definitions and perceptions infiltrate the public lives of wheelchair users, cause considerable macro and micro political difficulties, and consequently disable users in a myriad of different ways.