Technology Matters

Questions to Live With

David E. Nye

282 pages, parution le 01/03/2006

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Résumé

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."

L'auteur - David E. Nye

David E. Nye is Professor of Comparative American Studies and History at Warwick University. Nye was recently awarded the 2005 Leonardo Da Vinci Medal presented by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). The medal is the highest recognition from the Society for the History of Technology and is presented to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the history of technology, through research, teaching, publications, and other activities.

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Sommaire

Preface
Acknowledgements
Can We Define "Technology?"
Does Technology Control Us?
Is Technology Predictable?
How Do Historians Understand Technology?
Cultural Uniformity, or Diversity?
Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis?
Work: More, or Less? Better, or Worse?
Should "the Market" Select Technologies?
More Security, or Escalating Dangers?
Expanding Consciousness, or Encapsulation?
Not Just One Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	The MIT Press
Auteur(s)	David E. Nye
Parution	01/03/2006
Nb. de pages	282
Format	14,5 x 21
Couverture	Relié
Poids	425g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780262140935
ISBN13	978-0-262-14093-5