Policy Press

How Technologies Harm

A Relational Approach

By Mark Wood

With the increasing influence of digital technologies on society, this timely book examines the ways modern technologies can adversely influence human perception and behaviour.

Technologies contribute to harms in a variety of ways, but can we ever say they are harmful in-and-of-themselves?

This book offers a new way to understand how technologies, while not intrinsically harmful, are laden with values and dispositions that can contribute to negative outcomes. Building on insights from postphenomenology, realist social theory and the philosophy of action, it provides a framework for examining technology-harm relations: relations with technology that are harmful by virtue of what they contribute to bringing about. It is for anyone seeking to design, regulate, research or simply use technology in a way that prioritizes well-being.

Mark Wood is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University.

Introduction

Part 1: Understanding Harm

1. What Is Social Harm?

2. The Nature of Harm

Part 2: Understanding Technology

3. Instruments, Extensions, Affordances

4. Technology As Practice and Actant

5. Postphenomenology and Technological Mediation

Part 3: The Technology-Harm Relations Framework

6. An Overview of the Framework

7. Design Modes

8. Translation, Infusion, Zemiosis

9. Doing Harm With Things

10. Harms Beyond Use

11. Higher-Order Harm Relations

Conclusion: Pulling at the Threads of Enmeshment