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Technology and Society

Faculty

Mark D. Whitaker img
Mark D. Whitaker

Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison: Sociology

 

Personal Websites

https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdouglaswhitaker/

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Whitaker-2

https://sbsuny.academia.edu/MarkDouglasWhitaker

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Research Interests

Information Society; Information Communication Technology for Sustainable Development (ICT4SD); Mobile Phone Networks in Sustainable Development and Disaster Risk Reduction; Circular Economy; SDG#12: Encouraging Sustainable Production and Consumption; Smart Cities; Comparative Research on ‘Mobile Addiction’/Depression; Science and Technology Studies; Futures Studies; Comparative Historical Methods; World Regional Cultural Variations; Environmental Sociology; Environmental and/or Social Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA); Social Impact Assessment (SIA); Policy Evaluation; Consumption as Strategically Implemented, Network Analysis; Sociology of Religion, Science and Technology; Comparative Conditions of Successful/Failed Sustainability Programs and Successful/Failing Democracies; Comparative Development

Biography

Prior to joining SUNY Korea, he was the first Westerner to be a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department at Ewha Womans University. He subsequently served as the same at Kookmin University. His degree in Environmental Sociology comes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sociology Department, one of the world’s largest sociology departments known internationally as a powerhouse of sociological scholarship for nearly 100 years. It is one of the few places in the USA or the world to study Environmental Sociology. Environmental Sociology (as the study of the interactions of society, technology, and the environment) was pioneered in the 1970s from the social sciences at the University of Wisconsin and a few other schools, at the same time that Stony Brook University and a few other schools were pioneering “Technology and Society” management from the engineering side.

Dr. Whitaker was honored to give the keynote address at the International Conference on the Smart City and Future of Human Community in 2019. You can watch a video recording here: VIDEO LINK

His books include Toward a Bioregional State (2005), Ecological Revolution (2009), and the co-authored book The Korean Wave in a Post-Pandemic World (2023). The book Ecological Revolution is a comparative historical examination arguing that the main causes of environmental degradation are from unrepresentative politics and the choices that come from it. This is argued via showing common patterns of unrepresentative political, cultural, and material/environmental change in China, Japan, and Europe over several thousand years. (Excerpts: see ‘linkedin’ site, above.) In 2010, Dr.Whitaker received a grant award from the American Sociological Association in association with the U.S. National Science Foundation on the strength of his comparative historical environmental research in Ecological Revolution. He has presented this work at the International Conference on Civilization and Peace (hosted by the Academy of Korean Studies), the Korean Sociological Association, and at the International Sociological Association (in 2002 and 2010). In other work, he has presented at the “Green Tech” conferences within IEEE and co-chaired sessions at the International Human Computer Interface (IHCI) conferences.

The book The Korean Wave in a Post-Pandemic World (2023) is reviewed here. It is a book about learning factors for aiding national development from the example of the Korean Economic Miracle that is now flowing into the Korean cultural wave--both unique in the history of world development for their rapidity and durability. There are other books exclusively about Korean economics and exclusively about Korean culture, though this is the first book that follows how both are linked by the same ongoing Korean developmental models of the past and the same culture of the past. This slow aggregation has made a better future for Korea than other nation's policies and cultural dynamics, and it has maintained a large amount of ongoing innovation as well. It is equally a book about world development, the history of communications and an argument about different kinds of innovation in different cultural settings.

Recently, in 2020, Dr. Whitaker won the first two Korean National Science Foundation (K-NRF) grants ever given to SUNY Korea (2020-2023).

In both of these projects currently, he is very busy supporting and mentoring many students in real-world research projects related to grants for researching the circular economy and designing e-health solutions for mental problems.

For details about these two funded projects, the first Korean NRF grant involves his own model of sustainability called “Commodity Ecology.” This is his own planning and implementation rubric for a circular economy. It involves an assessment rubric of 130 categories of social uses of materials. In the first year of the project, he has hired 12 undergraduates, graduates, and alumni. He mentors them in research in material assessment, category by category, as they write with him an encyclopedia of our current good material and technical ideas to be posted online and printed. He argues we already have enough ideas for achieving sustainability now, in all categories of use, though these technologies and materials are simply being left unapplied and unintgrated in a system.

With his ICT4SD interest, these good material and technological ideas for sustainability are being ‘digitized’ and popularized online. This is because Commodity Ecology is now a mobile-phone-accessible platform designed to enfranchise billions worldwide in their own virtual and geographically real community-based discussions and implementation of circular economies around the world in 847 different ecoregions simultaneously.

To explain to policy makers about his online platform strategy for sustainability via circular economies worldwide, in 2019, Dr. Whitaker was invited to present this digital platform model of sustainability called Commodity Ecology at the United Nations in New York City as well as at the Asia Development Bank in Manila, Philippines.

Simultaneously, he participates in a second grant from the Korean NRF. He is one of many in a group grant called “Group Project on Depression Management and Medical Adherence.” It involves nine universities and institutes across Korea and India (with 4 or 5 schools/institutes in each country) and eleven professors. On this grant, Dr. Whitaker has hired four other Research Assistants. The goals for the first year are researching demographics of depression, suicide, and schizophrenia in both countries, researching how mobile phone applications and hardware peripherals might be used in e-health related to mental health assessment and treatment, as well as how gamification may be employed in such online treatment and monitoring projects.

Ask Dr. Whitaker if you could work for him on either project. He is hiring through 2023 on both projects.

Teaching

Dr. Whitaker enjoys being involved in curricular development at SUNY Korea. He has designed two fresh courses accepted into the official curriculum at Stony Brook University. One of these courses supports our fresh focus at SUNY Korea on “ICT4D.” This is the undergraduate course EST 372: “Mobile Revolution in Development”. The course summarizes how the faster and cheaper technological diffusion and expansion of mobile phone network value from 2007 has quickly changed past strategies of social development and economic development worldwide. This simultaneously erodes stability of previous social and economic arrangements.

The other course Dr. Whitaker designed supports DTS’s fresh Master’s Degree emphasis at SUNY Korea called Digital Technologies in Disaster Risk Reduction. This is the graduate course EST 559: “Mobile Technologies in Disaster Risk Reduction.” This course is about how mobile technologies/networks are changing and improving state disaster risk management.

In addition to the above courses, Dr. Whitaker enjoys regular teaching of the undergraduate required course EST 391 (Technology Assessment) and EST 194 (Decision-Making). He occasionally teaches EST 200, a survey course on the world history of media changes.

He enjoys teaching the graduate required course EST 582 (Introduction to Systems Concepts)

Past and Present Research

My academic life has been spent largely on two intertwined policy issues that are equally academic/scientific issues: (1) what are proper tactics for achieving a durable, extending, democratic, sustainable world order, and (2) how to describe what happens historically in social/environmental processes when we fail to have that democratic sustainable system.

There are seven substantive research areas that support these two intertwining policy and scientific agendas.

First, I continue detailed comparative historical research and publishing about environmental degradation and sustainability in world history.

Second, I am working on a theoretical and methodological summary of what I have learned so far in studying comparative environmental degradation which I would characterize as a ‘green theory of history’: in the same cases, there is an unpredictable strategic and tactical interaction of degradative forces and sustainable forces in world history at all times in any cases, instead of some periods or cases being ‘degradative’ and some being ‘sustainable.’

Third, I am preparing a useful historical anthology about the origins and interactions of our twelve very different ‘modern theoretical constructs’ that we use to think about environmental degradation and sustainability policy. These twelve constructs compete with each other politically and culturally in attempting to justify their own versions of environmental policy since policy interventions can be based on completely different analyses (yet equally ethically motivated, just to different ethics) of the same environmental problems. Hopefully, a less reductionist analysis of environmental problems can be established from such analysis.

Fourth, I am involved in research about problematic mobile phone use. In that project, I am a co-designer of the MATU Survey (Mobile Addiction and Time Use Survey) begun at SUNY Korea in 2017 and now used in three countries: South Korea, the USA, and Poland.

Fifth, as mentioned above, I am designing a virtual community platform called Commodity Ecology. This allows people worldwide to design and to discuss ideas toward their own circular economies based on their own different regional priorities toward Sustainable Development Goal #12 (Enhance Responsible Consumption and Production).

Sixth, I got interested in the world history of communication changes due to my many focuses above about the technological diffusion of mobile phone networks. Theoretically, I feel mobile phone saturated societies are building “Regime 7” in the world history of media regimes. I frame these seven regimes as speech, complex scripts, simple scripts, mass publishing, non-electrical telecommunications, ‘one-way’ electrical communications, and now ‘two-way’ mobile-phone-networked societies. Media regime changes have only happened seven times in 5,000 years. Each time is a period of great ‘mismatch’ and ‘challenge’ when people and power are still arranged in the previous media regime even as the next communicative/media invention interrupts past social, political, and communicative relations.  My perspective of world history as seven media regimes is at the following link. This was presented as an invited guest lecture in Poland in 2019: VIDEO LINK

Seventh, I have always been interested in world development and how to solve bad developmental problems for nations. I am curious what we can learn from South Korea for what may be transferable to other countries from South Korea's world-first fast development drive from 1961 to the present. Since I have been in Korea since 2007, I ruminate a lot on this question of what can be learned from Korea for use in other countries in a comparative sense. My research on these comparative factors of development in the case of South Korea's economic development and Korean cultural wave is useful for other nations' future policies. That policy analysis is now published in the recently co-authored book The Korean Wave in a Post-Pandemic World (2023).

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