Corporate Cyborgs: the Ontology of the Modern Business Corporation
Wade Rowland Introduction (Note: a version of this article was published in the journal Social Epistemoplogy in 2005) Corporations are much in the news as this is being written. Pharmaceutical firms are being questioned for their unwillingness to provide affordable anti-AIDS drugs to Africa, and for having promoted hormone replacement therapy for menopausal Western women with bogus health claims. Corporate concentration in media is being called a threat to democracy, second only to corporate donations to political campaigns. Corporate lobbies...
Read MoreA Covid-19 introduction to Morality by Design: Technology’s Challenge to Human Values
Morality By Design was published in November, 2019, about the same time as scientists in Wuhan, China, discovered a novel coronavirus that would come to be identified by the name COVID-19, and in coming months sweep the world as a pandemic. Had the book been published a few months later, this is the preface I might have written for it. • It is impossible to write about ethics in this chaotic time, without making some reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. Or to the massive social justice demonstrations that broke out in the midst of the global health crisis, provoked initially by the viral...
Read MoreMessage to Kayleigh: Surrogacy is Hazardous
Note: This was written for Huffington Post October 21, 2016. McEnany (Pres. Donald Trump’s new press secretary) obviously was not paying attention. by Wade Rowland There was a lot that was extraordinary about Wednesday night’s third presidential debate in Las Vegas, not the least of which was Donald Trump’s assertion that he, and not the electorate, would decide who won the election on November 9th. But looking beyond the content of the debate itself, there is much to be learned about the media and its problematic role in modern elections. Watching the circus-like event and...
Read MoreMorality by Design: technology’s challenge to human values
The introduction: How do you build a utopia? What does it take to construct the best of all possible worlds? Thomas More chose the name Utopia (in Greek, it means no-place) for the ideal society he described in his Renaissance masterpiece of 1516, written as a young man long before he served as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII (and was beheaded for his trouble). The book was a visionary critique of fractious English society which More described as a “conspiracy of the rich,” in which the “greedy, unscrupulous and useless” lived off the labour of others. In Utopia, he sketched a form...
Read MoreA Murderer’s Apology: The Raymond Williams Trial
© 2010 Wade Rowland If a long career in journalism has taught me anything about watching and reading the news, it is that the details of any story that can be described as “horrific” are best avoided. They usually teach nothing worth learning, and they can leave a permanent, toxic residue in the mind and spirit. These days I teach mass media literacy to university students, and in preparing for my undergraduate class last Friday, I felt I had no choice but to say something about the story on everyone’s mind, the Raymond Williams trial. That drove me to spend some time...
Read MorePost-Christmas thoughts about the CBC’s future
A visit to Lyon last week got me thinking about how dominant religions absorb and erase competing rites and traditions. France’s second city has been an important focus of Catholicism from the first century onward, but before that Lyon was a centre of worship of the Roman god Mithra. Scholars are divided as to the extent of early Christian syncretic borrowings from the cult and traditions of Mithraism, but other pagan appropriations are in plain view around Christmas time. The streets of old Lyon were festooned with coloured lights and pine boughs, traditions which derive from pre-Christian...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.