CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Societal Technological Literacy Is Essential For Sustainability
Tác giả
Wacker G.
Năm xuất bản
1991
Source title
International Symposium on Technology and Society, Proceedings
Số trích dẫn
1
DOI
10.1109/ISTAS.1991.700383
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
For a technologically-based society to achieve sustainability, it is essential that decision making procedures regarding technical issues reflect society's broadest needs and aspirations for current and future generations. An important aspect of defining society's mandate is to ensure public input into technical projects through the normal political process and, more importantly, through public forums and other intervener procedures. The effectiveness of the latter methods relies heavily on the accountability of all participants. Public forums have been particularly useful in convincing the technical community to be more societally responsible, and to understand that scientific endeavors and engineering design are social processes as well as technical activities. However, the converse of this is not as readily observable: by and large the nontechnical participants in the process have accepted little, if any, accountability for the technical or economic aspects of the decisions taken. Lack of accountability jeopardizes the validity of the decisions and presents a serious threat to achieving sustainability. If citizens from a range of backgrounds are to be involved in influencing technical decisions through public mechanisms, it is essential that they are somehow held accountable for their involvement. Moreover, in the same way that technical participants require some understanding of relevant social issues, nontechnical participants need sufficient familiarity with the procedures of science and technology to enable them to make discerning, responsible judgments about the social relevance of particular issues. This paper takes the position that, in a technologically-based society, all liberal arts, humanities, social science post-secondary education ought to provide for a minimum level of technological literacy if a meaningful level of sustainability is to be achieved. The primary reason for this position is to achieve accountability of the "public's" representatives, thus ensuring the continuation or succession of public input mechanisms as a means of obtaining society's mandate. © 1991 IEEE.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Nơi xuất bản
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Hình thức xuất bản
Conference paper
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus