Binding: Paperback
Description: In modern life technology is everywhere. Yet as a concept technology is a mess. In popular discourse technology is little more than the latest digital innovations. Scholars do little better offering up competing definitions that include everything from steelmaking to singing. In Technology: Critical History of a Concept Eric Schatzberg explains why technology is so difficult to define by examining its three thousand year history one shaped by persistent tensions between scholars and technical practitioners. Since the time of the ancient Greeks scholars have tended to hold technicians in low esteem defining technical practices as mere means toward ends defined by others. Technicians in contrast have repeatedly pushed back against this characterization insisting on the dignity creativity and cultural worth of their work. The tension between scholars and technicians continued from Aristotle through Francis Bacon and into the nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century that modern meanings of technology arose: technology as the industrial arts technology as applied science and technology as technique. Schatzberg traces these three meanings to the present day when discourse about technology has become pervasive but confusion among the three principal meanings of technology remains common. He shows that only through a humanistic concept of technology can we understand the complex human choices embedded in our modern world.
Title: Technology Critical History Of A Concept
Author(s): Schatzberg Eric
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226583976
Pages: 336 Pages
Publication Date: 11/12/2018
Category: History Of Engineering & Technology