Fourteen: Media, Knowledge, and Technology

We have come a long way from the earliest chapters of this work, zooming out ever farther to put our current moment in social space-time in context. There are woes and promises connected to the fruits of human ingenuity and scientific endeavor—I hope not to have suggested that technology is wholly “good” or “bad,” only that there are reasons to be optimistic, and skeptical, of the promises of this age. This age, I note, is called modernity, a term that literally means “now-ness” and a device by which human beings, social scientists and others, have come to divide the past from the present, and some ways of being in the world from others. Sociology as a discipline emerged to understand the problems of modernity.