The promulgation of materials produced at Institute retreats and other sponsored meetings will be wide and routine. Institute related issues and recommendations will be sent to scholarly societies and journals, as well as newspapers, more popular weekly magazines, political agencies, and television and radio venues. The Institute will convene conferences, workshops, and occassions of public discourse on the following topics. Examples of current and suggested transformations to the canon and the appropriation of humanistic themes by scholars in the sciences and other disciplines will be studied and assessed. There exists a long and rich tradition of myth, legend, fairy tale, and fabular poetry that describes technology as antithetical to human imagination.
Technology is portrayed as hierarchical, rigidly structured, and predictable.
Many fairy tales, such as Rumplestiltskin, portray technology as a disenfranchising force that overturns traditional roles, individual identity, and cultural continuity, with ambiguous results. 5. Contemporary Definitions and Descriptions of Technology. Focus on the terms, particularly the metaphors, similes, and analogies, used to describe current digital technology as a means to discover the cultural contextualization of new phenomena, as well as the prevailing constraints on applications and opportunities that such language might entail. General Research on the Reception and Predictions of Technology Analysis of the initial and developing response to technologies, e.g. gunpowder, the steam engine, the laser, telephone, and television to discern the evolution of a technology's appropriation into a social construct. Until recently, cultural values and survival techniques were passed along in human societies largely through story telling.