The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems

by Rosner,Lisa; Rosner,Lisa

• ISBN13: 9780415947107
• ISBN10: 0415947103
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781135938505
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-11
• Publisher: Routledge
• More Book Details

Summary

The term "technological fix" should mean a fix provided by technology--a solution for all of our problems, from medicine and food production to the environment and business. Instead, technological fix has come to mean a cheap, quick fix using inappropriate technology that usually creates more problems than it solves. This collection sets out the distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, the essays trace the technological fix as it has appeared throughout the twentieth century. Addressing such "fixes" as artificial hearts, industrial agriculture and climate engineering, these essays examine our need to turn to technology for solutions to all of our problems.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Fixing bodies
Artificial hearts : a technological fix more monstrous than miraculous?	p. 13
Plugging in to modernity : Wilshire's I-ON-A-CO and the psychic fix	p. 31
Technology and disability	p. 61
Fixing food
The nutritional enrichment of flour and bread : technological fix or half-baked solution	p. 75
Long-haul trucking and the technopolitics of industrial agriculture, 1945-1975	p. 93
Synthetic arcadias : dreams of meal pills, air food, and algae burgers	p. 119
Fixing the environment
When everybody wins does the environment lose? : the environmental techno-fix in twentieth-century American mining	p. 137
Solving air pollution problems once and for all : the potential and the limits of technological fixes	p. 155
Fixing the weather and climate : military and civilian schemes for cloud seeding and climate engineering	p. 175
Fixing business
The "problem" of computer-computer communication, 1995-2000 : a technological fix?	p. 203
Innovation junctions	p. 219
Afterword	p. 241
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