Technology Matters Questions to Live With

by Nye, David E.

• ISBN13: 9780262640671
• ISBN10: 0262640678
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-24
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Winner, 2009 Sally Hacker Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2006 Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age-as children, we play with technological toys: trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances-Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them-to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."

Author Biography

David E. Nye is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute and the History of Science and Technology program at the University of Minnesota and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His other books published by the MIT Press include Electrifying America and American Technological Sublime. He was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2005 and was knighted by the Queen of Denmark in 2013.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Can We Define "Techonology?"	p. 1
DoesTechnology Control Us?	p. 17
Is Technology Predictable?	p. 33
How Do Historians Understand Technology?	p. 49
Cultural Uniformity, or Diversity?	p. 67
Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis?	p. 87
Work: More, or Less? Better, or Worse?	p. 109
Should "the Market" Select Technologies?	p. 135
More Security, or Escalating Dangers?	p. 161
Expanding Consciousness, or Encapsulation?	p. 185
Not Just One Future	p. 209
Notes	p. 227
Bibliography	p. 253
Index	p. 275
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