Essay Review ID: CBB521615599

What Is Technology? (2020)

unapi

‘Technology’ is one of the keywords of our world, yet it is also one of the most confused. As an analytical category it seems necessary for our understanding of all of humanity’s history, and indeed beyond. We are probably comfortable with asserting that humans have had technologies since the Palaeolithic, and a menagerie of animals, from crows to chimps, have even been identified as tool users. As an actors’ category ‘technology’ is of surprisingly recent vintage, although cognate terms – techne, arts, and so on – have a much longer history. Yet even for a recent English word ‘technology’ has come to embrace often conflicting meanings. In this essay review I have three aims. First, I will offer a summary of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the history of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ categories. Second, I will conduct a critical analysis, arguing that Schatzberg, while helpfully placing past ways of thinking about technology into two camps, ones he calls the ‘cultural’ and ‘instrumental’ approaches, makes a misstep when he favours the former over the latter. Third, I offer an extension of my preferred instrumentalist definition, one which highlights an essential property of technologies – their power to intervene over scales – in a way that, I suggest, offers a new, invigorating direction of study for historians of science and technology.

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Review Of

Book Eric Schatzberg (October 2018) Technology: Critical History of a Concept. unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB521615599/

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Authors & Contributors
Hofmann, Kerstin
Giannini, Giulia
Hendriksen, Marieke M. A.
Chalmers, Alan Francis
Wark, McKenzie
Vetter, Jeremy
Concepts
History of science, as a discipline
Methodology
Historiography
Technology, general histories
Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
History of technology, as a discipline
Time Periods
19th century
Ancient
21st century
20th century
Early modern
20th century, late
Places
Germany
England
United States
Portugal
Greece
France
Institutions
Institut istorii nauki i tekhniki (Akademiia nauk SSSR)
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