- 211 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Only available on web
About This Book
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.
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Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: When History Changes Technology
- Chapter 1âHoneycombing the PastâFinding Meaning in a Rapidly Industrializing World
- Chapter 2âA Bad State of the ArtsâHistorical Accounts of Technology in Thorstein Veblenâs Wake
- Chapter 3âDisequilibrium, Unwilling Robots, and DecreationâStuart Chaseâs Economic â Functional â Political Relations to Technology
- Chapter 4âConverting Technology into Human CultureâLewis Mumfordâs Social â Aesthetic â Moral Relations to the Past
- Chapter 5âIn-Formation Technology: An Ungrounding ExperienceâMarshall McLuhanâs Aesthetic â Epistemic â Material Relations to the Past
- Chapter 6âCreating a New Technological Narrative
- Epilogue: Impoverished Intelligence and Curbing Our Technological Enthusiasm
- Index