The Languages of Edison's Light (Inside Technology)

Bazerman, Charles

ISBN 10: 0262523264 / ISBN 13: 9780262523264

Published by The MIT Press, 2002

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0003905956

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Languages of Edison's Light (Inside Technology)
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262523264
• ISBN 13: 9780262523264
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Technology is business, and dealing with the media, the public, financiers, and government agencies can be as important to an invention's success as effective product development. To understand how rhetoric works in technology, one cannot do better than to start with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and the incandescent light bulb. Charles Bazerman tells the story of the emergence of electric light as one of symbols and communication. He examines how Edison and his colleagues represented light and power to themselves and to others as the technology was transformed from an idea to a daily fact of life. He looks at the rhetoric used to create meaning and value for the emergent technology in the laboratory, in patent offices and courts, in financial markets, and in boardrooms, city halls, newspapers, and the consumer marketplace. Along the way he describes the social and communicative arrangements that shaped and transformed the world in which Edison acted. He portrays Edison, both the individual and the corporation, as a self-conscious social actor whose rhetorical groundwork was crucial to the technology's material realization and success.

About the Authors

Charles Bazerman is Chair and Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Wiebe E. Bijker is Professor at Maastricht University and the author of Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press) and other books.

Trevor Pinch is Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University and coeditor of The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (anniversary edition, MIT Press).