Technology and Cultural Tectonics: Shifting Values and Meanings

What impact has technology had on cultural meanings, values, and symbols? This anthropological exploration shows how technologies produce novel and sometimes jarring realignments among cultural institutions. Contemporary reproductive, medical, genetic, and information technologies forge unprecedented family relationships, produce a new mode of thinking based on the confluence of artificial and human intelligence, and reconfigure conventional scales of time and space. Taken together, they redefine what it is to be human.