Synopsis
Winner, 2009 Sally Hacker Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). and 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. 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."
Reviews
Technology can seem like an implacable force that gathers power as it advances and abruptly transforms society. But Nye, a scholar who carefully studies the symbiotic relationship between humankind and its tools, observes that creating tools and technologies has always been intrinsic to being human, and that while it seems as though we're being controlled by technology, we are in fact making choices about which technologies we embrace and how we use them. In an accessible narrative spiked with clarion examples and nimble interpretations, Nye poses a series of leading questions that guide readers to a more accurate perception of the unintended, unpredictable, and serendipitous evolution and impact of technology. How does technology influence how we interact with nature, how we care for ourselves, and how we learn and work? Are our technologies improving our lives or limiting our horizons and endangering our very existence? The issues pertaining to the role of technology on earth are complex and ever more urgent, and Nye provides an invaluably methodical and provocative primer. Donna Seaman
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