Bibliographic record
Abstract
[The real world of technology] Few have captured the essence of how technology and society mutually shape each other as Ursula Franklin did in her famous lecture series, “The Real World of Technology”. She gave the lectures in 1989 as part of the Canadian public service radio CBC’s Massey Lectures, and the following year they were published as a book (which has since been followed by several editions). In this translation of the first two lectures into Swedish, we share Franklin’s thoughts on how technology permeates and shapes our modern world. Technology is not just machines and tools, but an entire system of acting, thinking, organizing and exercising power. She describes technology as “the house in which we all live”, where more and more aspects of life are affected by its structure. Franklin warns us of the dangers of people being increasingly reduced to subservient cogs in a machine and of the pseudorealities that saturate our media and estrange us from our own lived experiences of the world around us. With her historical and sociological perspective on the real world of technology, she expands our understanding of technology as human action and social organization. Publication history: Translation of chapters one and two from Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (House of Anansi Press 1999). (Published 23 October 2025) Citation: Franklin, Ursula (2025) “Teknikens faktiska värld”, in Tekniken i samhället, samhället i tekniken , special issue of Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys , issue 18, pp. 13–49. https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.18.1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.033 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".