[acc-cca-l] The Need to Rename Tech

[Crystal Chokshi]

[△EXTERNAL]



Dear colleagues,


Robin Mansell and I are delighted to announce our response to longstanding calls for new language to describe technology.


The Need to Rename Tech

The Need to Rename Tech<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-05155-4> is a book about words that fool us into thinking the digital technologies we use every day are beautiful, benign, and consequence-free.


They are not.


As the writers in this collection show, digital technologies have serious social, political, and climate consequences. These consequences are concealed by reductive nouns and misleading metaphors–think “learning management system” and “predictive tech”–brilliantly coined by the technology industry to resist change and sustain the status quo.


Each chapter in this book discusses a specific technology and, crucially, makes a move to rename it. Collectively, we subvert Big Tech’s careful branding and rechristen today’s most popular technologies in ways that point explicitly to their problems. This book proposes an alternative vocabulary for digital technologies in the Anthropocene, drawing attention to what they actually bring about instead of parroting Silicon Valley notions of what people should buy.


In Your Teaching

The Need to Rename Tech is not a textbook, but it will be useful in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on media and communication studies, science and technology studies, feminist approaches to technology, the rhetoric of technology, environmental media studies, and communication for social change. Students and academics will benefit from the varied qualitative methodologies discussed in the book, such as fabulation and fictocriticism.


Get the Book

Learn more about the book by clicking here<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-05155-4>. Because of this book’s price point, Robin and I are hopeful you will ask your library to acquire a copy. (And I would be happy to share a 20% discount code. Please get in touch: cchokshi at mtroyal.ca<mailto:cchokshi at mtroyal.ca>.)


Help Us Achieve Our Goal!

We are really hoping to see 50 libraries acquire the book within three months. Please consider making a request to your library and, if you do, please let me know. Robin and I would be grateful for your support.




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Crystal Chokshi PhD, APR

Assistant Professor

School of Communication Studies
cchokshi at mtroyal.ca<mailto:cchokshi at mtroyal.ca>  |  403.440.6088 office
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