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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.483
EAN num: 9780262640671
ISBN number: 0262640678
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: October 31, 2007
Publishing house: The MIT Press
Sale Popularity Level: 57365
Studio: The MIT Press
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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. Among them: Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? 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? 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.'
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Rated by buyers -
The title is one that will often elicit the response, "Well Duuuuh!", yet that should not be said with any great emphasis, for the content backs it up. Nye points out that if a society can be insular or universal it is possible for technological progress to be reversed.
He cites the example of Japan, which rejected guns and contact with Western nations. The warrior class "forgot" the knowledge of how to make and use guns in favor of the more pure weapons of swords and the other Samurai tools of battle. However, once the American Commodore Perry sailed into Japanese waters to "convince" the Japanese leadership to open up the country, they understood that the days of isolation were over.
The other example noted is that of Amish communities in the United States. These groups selectively filter new technologies, incorporating only the items that they believe will not dramatically alter their society.
However, these two examples are very much the exception through human history. The Japanese islands remained free only because the western powers made no endeavor to control them. It was the only country in Asia that was not made either a direct or de-facto colony of a Western nation in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Amish maintain their insular culture only because they are part of a society that provides them the legal and social protection to do so.
The global nature of the world has changed the situation; it is now possible for potential new technologies to be introduced slowly or not at all. Given the successes in cloning mammals, it is nearly certain that humans could be cloned. Yet, there appears to be universal agreement to delay or even ban the technology. Several nations possess the technical ability to build nuclear weapons but have decided that it is in their best interests not to do so.
Nye also goes into a great deal of detail over the rise of new technologies and how many were slow to catch the attention of the masses. However, once the new technologies were adopted by large numbers of people, they caused dramatic change in society. The telegraph, telephone and the gasoline automobile were three items that many saw no need for when very first introduced but are now staples of the world.
Nearly all technologies have negative consequences and some have been introduced without a complete examination of the alternatives. The nuclear power plants built in the sixties and seventies are an example. I can recall the arguments made at that time in favor of these plants stating that the breeder reactors would create more fuel than they consume. Since then the problem has become what to do with this "waste" that will remain dangerously radioactive for centuries.
The advance of technology is a very complex issue that needs to be met and analyzed in detail before it should be allowed to progress. Nye examines all of the issues surrounding technology introduction and develops an analysis of the problems that provide a glimmer of hope that the future is bright and not hopeless.
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This book outlines a brief history of technology and the social uses of each innovation. The interaction between technology and society cannot be ignored, which is a great consideration in this great monograph. Easily something to consider for the rest of your life.
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