Technology and Choice: Readings from Technology and Culture - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226467775 ISBN 13: 9780226467771

Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1991

Synopsis

Innovation the imaginative attempt to introduce something new or to solve some problem smashes routine and demands choice even if only the choice to retain the status quo This collection of fourteen essays provides a spectrum of historical perspectives on how when or why individuals societies governments and industries have made choices regarding the use of technologies

About this title

About the Author:

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette is an independent historian based in Washington, DC.

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection of essays, culled from issues of Technology and Culture since 1966, offers academic interpretations of key developments in industrial history, mostly in the U.S. The late John G. Burke explores the movement toward regulation of an industry (in this case the manufacture of steamboat boilers) after explosions killed 2563 people between 1816 and 1848. Also noteworthy is Claude S. Fischer's analysis of telephone use from the late 1880s to 1980, showing how customers adapted what was intended to be a tool for business and functional information into a means of socialization, against the will of the industry. In a pointed article, Christine E. Bose, Philip L. Bereano and Mary Malloy argue that household technology has not reduced the time women spend on housework nor made it more pleasant. Other essays discuss the U.S. government's ambivalence toward technology during the Depression, and unsuccessful attempts at curbing air-pollution in 19th-century Britain. LaFollette is the author of Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910-1955 ; Stine is curator of engineering at the National Museum of American History.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0226467775
• ISBN 13: 9780226467771
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350
• Editor: LaFollette Marcel Chotkowski, Stine Jeffrey K.