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Technology
In modern life, technology is everywhere. Yet as a concept, technology is a mess. In popular discourse, technology is little more than the latest digital innovations. Scholars do little better, offering up competing definitions that include everything from steelmaking to singing. In Technology: Critical History of a Concept, Eric Schatzberg explains why technology is so difficult to define by examining its three thousand year history, one shaped by persistent tensions between scholars and technical practitioners. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars have tended to hold technicians in low esteem, defining technical practices as mere means toward ends defined by others. Technicians, ...
Technologies of Power
This collection explores how technologies become forms of power, how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power. The authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity. They consider the relationship among the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labor; political ideology and industrial development; and political practices during the Cold War. The essays show how insig...
Reframing Technology
For over a hundred years, technological change has been framed using a simple narrative: technology drives history. Reframing Technology challenges this idea of technological determinism through metahistorical and literary analyses that locate the birth of contingent frameworks in the historiography of technology in and around the 1930s. The book also traces how the formal discipline of the History of Technology was remarkably preconfigured by four North American authors who were not professional historians, Thorstein Veblen, Stuart Chase, Lewis Mumford, and Marshall McLuhan. They are considered as a continuum and are put in dialogue despite their training in different disciplines. Their work is then linked up with the emergence of formal and institutional inquiry into narratives of technology at the end of the twentieth century. The ideas in the book are applied to current discussions about the future of technology and artificial intelligence. The book’s main argument is that, as the authors listed above suggest, we need to think beyond "the machine," and reframe technology as a cultural practice, rather than thinking of it as an object or a tool.
Technology
Technology: The Game Changer presents the case that technology should be seen as an essential feature of the human condition. Technology is defined as extending the capabilities of life processes, harnessing and regulating natural phenomena, enabling complex life-forms, such as humans, to build societies which step up through a series of gears. It is argued that humans are not only animals that make technology, but also animals made by technology. Nothing in history, it is proposed, makes sense except in the light of technology. It is contended that a technological perspective provides a satisfying and inclusive account of where we came from, who and what we are, and the various contingent futures that may face us. Taking a universal view, technology is presented as a basic feature of nature, necessarily central to the evolution and history of intelligent beings, whenever and wherever in the cosmos they might arise.
Design Technics
Leading scholars historicize and theorize technology’s role in architectural design Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume’s contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories—some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode—of seven techniques regularly used by the desi...
Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600–1600
How medieval and Renaissance technology shaped Mediterranean and European society across a millennium. In Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600, Pamela O. Long explores the intricate web of technological advancements that shaped Mediterranean and European societies during the medieval and early modern periods. From the essential crafts of ploughing and tailoring to the sophisticated hydraulic systems and monumental building constructions, Long illuminates how ordinary people harnessed and transformed their world. Drawing on recent scholarship on environmental history and the history of technology—as well as materials, object biographies, and the circulation of objects—...
Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences
The Handbook Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences addresses numerous issues in the emerging field of the philosophy of those sciences that are involved in the technological process of designing, developing and making of new technical artifacts and systems. These issues include the nature of design, of technological knowledge, and of technical artifacts, as well as the toolbox of engineers. Most of these have thus far not been analyzed in general philosophy of science, which has traditionally but inadequately regarded technology as mere applied science and focused on physics, biology, mathematics and the social sciences. - First comprehensive philosophical handbook on technology and the engineering sciences - Unparalleled in scope including explorative articles - In depth discussion of technical artifacts and their ontology - Provides extensive analysis of the nature of engineering design - Focuses in detail on the role of models in technology
Consuming Nature
Takes readers to Wisconsin's Fox River Valley more than fifty years ago to recount how technological and economic progress contributed to residents' growing opposition to the industrial pollution of the river.
