: langdon winner

Langdon Winner is a political theorist who focuses upon social and political issues that surround modern technological change. He is the author of Autonomous Technology, a study of the idea of "technology-out-of-control" in modern social thought, The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, and editor of Democracy in a Technological Society.

Praised by The Wall Street Journal as "The leading academic on the politics of technology", Mr. Winner was born and raised  in San Luis Obispo, California. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He has also taught at The New School for Social Research, M.I.T., College of the Atlantic, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe. In 1991-1992 he was visiting research fellow at the Center for Technology and Culture at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Mr. Winner is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. A sometime rock critic, he was contributing editor at Rolling Stone in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has contributed articles on rock and roll to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Encylopaedia Britannica. At present he is doing research and writing on a book about the politics of design in the contexts of engineering, architecture and political theory. Another book, a collection of essays on technology and human experience, is also underway.

Mr. Winner's views on social, political and environmental issues appear regularly in Tech Knowledge Review, published in the on-line journal "NetFuture". His radio commentaries on environmental issues can be heard on the NPR program, "Living on Earth."

Contact points:
email: winner@rpi.edu
web: http://wwww.rpi.edu/~winner
tel: +1 518-276-8498