Technology and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart (review)","authors":"Kaushik Roy","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920568","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> by Paul Lockhart <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kaushik Roy (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> By Paul Lockhart. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. xii + 624. <p>Gunpowder changed the course of warfare and, ipso facto, global history. The advocates of the Military Revolution thesis (starting from Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker's <em>The Military Revolution</em>, 1988) argue along this line. Even if one challenges this \"big\" assertion, there is no denying that gunpowder weaponries definitely constitute a break with the medieval past. There are some sophisticated global surveys about the history of the interrelationship between the changing contours of war and the evolution of military technology (for instance, Martin van Creveld's <em>Technology and War</em>, 1989; Trevor N. Dupuy's <em>The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare</em>, 1990; and Jeremy Black's <em>War and Technology</em>, 2013, among others). However, such broad-range accounts provide few details about how the different weapons worked. On the other hand, we have monographs detailing the characteristics of particular weapon systems like AK-47s, Tiger tanks, etc. Such microstudies with a wealth of technical information interest only collectors of weapons and military buffs. Interested educated readers and historians are thus left hanging between broad-brush treatments of weapon systems at one pole and microstudies of specific weapons at the other.</p> <p>In the voluminous work under review, Paul Lockhart, professor of history at Wright State University, fills this vacuum. He turns the focus on the technicalities of the weapons that made up the era of gunpowder warfare during the last 600 years. He begins in circa 1400 and ends with the end of the Cold War. To avoid the barrage of criticisms that Parker and W. H. McNeill (for his <em>The Pursuit of Power</em>, 1982) received, Lockhart limits his gaze to Western Europe and the United States. Rightly he says that the 1980s marked the end of the dominance of gunpowder weapons and the 1990s saw the beginning of the Information Revolution, which resulted in the primacy of networking of information systems, with firepower taking a secondary role in war. <strong>[End Page 431]</strong></p> <p>Lots of information regarding the arms and munitions used in the three domains (air, land, and sea) is pounded on the readers analytically and succinctly. Lockhart tells us concisely about the characteristics of the important weapons, how they worked, and why they were being replaced by other weapon systems. We get a clear idea of a matchlock and why it was replaced by a musket in the sixteenth century, the difference between breechloaders and muzzleloaders, the shift from black powder to smokeless powder toward the end of the nineteenth century, the transition from coal to oil engines at the beginning of the twentieth cen","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie","authors":"Rachel Maines","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920527","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie <i>Barbie</i> is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supposed \"World Map\" in one scene. For nations in and around the South China Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claims to territorial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerwig's film is a runaway success, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dollars and counting.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Public History: Introducing Barbenheimer","authors":"Ruth Oldenziel","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920525","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Public History:&lt;span&gt;Introducing Barbenheimer&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Ruth Oldenziel &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;The summer of 2023 marked the surprising blockbuster season of two films: Christopher Nolan's &lt;em&gt;Oppenheimer&lt;/em&gt;, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, and Greta Gerwig's &lt;em&gt;Barbie&lt;/em&gt;, a fantasy comedy about the American doll who conquered the world. Released on the same day, July 21, the cultural phenomenon also created a portmanteau of the films' titles. The portmanteau &lt;em&gt;Barbenheimer&lt;/em&gt; was first coined as a joke to place the two films in the same analytical frame precisely because they seemed like such polar opposites—one about a serious and recognized scientific subject, the other about a frivolous fashion doll. The two films, now joined at the hip, provoked much public comment. &lt;em&gt;Technology and Culture&lt;/em&gt; invited two prominent historians of technology to offer their perspectives on the public history point of view of technology.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In Aimee Slaughter's essay on &lt;em&gt;Oppenheimer&lt;/em&gt;, she critiques the film for its conspicuous omission of crucial perspectives, noting the absence of the perspective of the people of New Mexico, whose land was occupied during the Manhattan Project and who have been affected by its aftermath ever since, as well as the oversight of the contributions of women scientists during the Manhattan Project. Equally important is her critique of the film's failure to address the profound suffering of the Japanese people in Hiroshima as a result of the atomic bombing, weaving her personal and local reception of the film into her reading of it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nolan's &lt;em&gt;Oppenheimer&lt;/em&gt;, according to Slaughter, is instead \"in awe of physics and the power it can bestow.\" The film is less interested in science than in power, pitting Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director, against Lewis Strauss, a man who worked for the U.S. military, managing and rewarding munitions production, and who went on to become a major figure in nuclear weapons development, energy policy, and U.S. nuclear power after the war. She finds the figure of Strauss particularly noteworthy as the counterpoint to Oppenheimer \"because it highlights the relationship between scientists and government, which is often ignored in popular images of science.\" Moreover, &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 315]&lt;/strong&gt; \"federal and military involvement in science is not portrayed in a particularly positive light.\"&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;At the same time, &lt;em&gt;Oppenheimer&lt;/em&gt; offers an all-too-familiar public image of science and technology as the \"individualized work of masculine genius,\" despite scholarship to the contrary.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Barbie is Oppenheimer's photographic negative. Since the 1950s, Barbie has represented a universe for girls in which the serious business is to catch a husband, raise a family with him, and thriftily outfit the growing children—with the pr","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of \"Books That Sing\" by Justin St. Clair (review)","authors":"Sara Tanderup Linkis","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920563","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of \"Books That Sing\"&lt;/em&gt; by Justin St. Clair &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Sara Tanderup Linkis (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of \"Books That Sing\"&lt;/em&gt; By Justin St. Clair. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 182. &lt;p&gt;The aspect of sound has become increasingly relevant to consider in studies of books and literature as the world of books is adjusting to a \"turn towards audio.\" Audiobooks have become more popular than ever before, and consequently we see increasing experimentation with sound in books: books that include music and sound effects are becoming mainstream, and new hybrid formats are emerging. This development has resulted in new scholarly attention toward an otherwise overlooked perspective, namely the dynamics between sound and text, or more specifically, between books and music.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The timing thus seems perfect for Justin St. Clair's &lt;em&gt;Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age&lt;/em&gt;. While most research in the field centers on audiobooks (e.g., Matthew Rubery, Iben Have, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen), St. Clair focuses on the subgenre of soundtracked books, defined as \"a book (a physical print publication, or its digital analogue) for which a musical soundtrack has been produced\" (p. 1). The result is a specific hybridity, \"the visuality of narrative print media coupled with the aurality of musical sound recordings\" (p. 1), which makes the form interesting, according to St. Clair. Departing from Murray Schafer's much-debated notion of \"schizo\" analysis, he introduces the concept of \"schizotemporality,\" signifying a split between the readtime of the text and the runtime of the musical recording, and he demonstrates how this aspect defines uses of soundtracked books throughout the last century.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Focusing on the subgenre results in what St. Clair calls an \"idiosyncratic trip through a hundred years of media history\" (p. 1). While the project might seem idiosyncratic, with a selection of more or less eccentric case studies from children's \"Bubble Books\" to New Age sci-fi novels, it does result in a convincing piece of media history, presenting a development from educational to literary uses of the sound-text combination. The former tendency is demonstrated in case studies of the Bubble Books series, early twentieth-century children's books published with miniature records (ch. 1), and a study of musical ethnographies and midcentury exotica, focusing on the Columbia Legacy Collection (1954–72; ch. 2). Combining close readings with rich contextualizations, St. Clair demonstrates how these examples reflect uses &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 422]&lt;/strong&gt; of the singing book to illustrate established myths and conventions: retelling fairytales in the case of the Bubble Books and confirming ethnic stereotypes in the Legacy Collection","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre by Philip Butterworth (review)","authors":"W. B. Worthen","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920564","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre&lt;/em&gt; by Philip Butterworth &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; W. B. Worthen (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre&lt;/em&gt; By Philip Butterworth and edited by Peter Harrop. London: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xiv + 346. &lt;p&gt;Philip Butterworth's illuminating &lt;em&gt;Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic&lt;/em&gt;, a collection of essays largely published since the 1990s, casts an attentive eye to the handmade technologies supporting a crucial aspect of medieval English culture: the vivid strain of artistic and social performances—annual religious cycle pageants, civic and royal spectacles—animating city life, and suggestively, their descendants in modern restorations of medieval drama. For historians of technology, Butterworth offers detailed accounts of the making of specific tools, of the purveyors of theatrical technology (props, costumes, fire), and of the intertwining of representational technologies—especially the pageant wagon or carriage—with medieval social life. The opening essay treats the 1433 York Mercers' Indenture, discovered in 1971, which contracted craftsmen to build one of the most important wagons in the York Corpus Christi cycle, that series of forty-eight Biblical narratives tracing history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, performed processually at a series of stations throughout the city on a single day (the Feast of Corpus Christi, late spring). Each was financed by a trade guild: the wealthy Mercers were awarded the climactic finale of the forty-eight pageants, &lt;em&gt;Domesday&lt;/em&gt;. \"Item, for bynding of a pair of whelys\": Butterworth traces the then-short history of spoked wheels in England and the necessary practice of binding the rim with a thin band of iron. This process, though, suggests the importance of the Mercers and of what was called \"the Play of Corpus Christi,\" as it required an exemption from a city ordinance banning iron-bound wheels as damaging to the pavement. Similarly, describing the complex axle structure and steering mechanism, and the indenture's mention of instruments used in storing the disassembled wagon, Butterworth turns to Chester, where a sixteenth-century collapsible wagon provides insight into the ways the Chester guilds—the Coopers and the Smiths—may have stored and maintained their wagons for their single yearly use. Butterworth gives similarly evocative attention to the making, supply, and use of props, the staging of hellmouths and hell fire, pyrotechnics, and to a signal variety of tricks and magic acts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The annual staging of the Corpus Christi pageants, as well as the various civil (the Lord Mayor), aristocratic, and royal progresses and pageants, involved construction (of wagons or temporary stages, as for the entry of Elizabeth Woodville into Norwich in 1469); the ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"81 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification by Richard F. Hirsh (review)","authors":"Abby Spinak","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920540","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification&lt;/em&gt; by Richard F. Hirsh &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Abby Spinak (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification&lt;/em&gt; By Richard F. Hirsh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 400. &lt;p&gt;It's hard to imagine being afraid of a refrigerator, but if your neighbor had died from the chemical leaks that plagued early models, you likely would have been. Even so, you might have been optimistic about crop yields from electrically stimulated soil. Or your time might have been better spent \"lobbying for better roads [over] electric lines\" (p. 249). As Richard Hirsh cautions, histories of early electrification programs \"should not reflect today's appreciation of electricity but rather the attitudes of people living almost a century ago\" (p. 252).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Powering American Farms&lt;/em&gt; is an explicitly revisionist history that sheds new light on private power companies' contributions to rural electrification in the United States. Hirsh rightly notes that energy historians have privileged the institutional narratives of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 378]&lt;/strong&gt; and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—New Deal–era federal projects that spurred rapid power extension out to (as the story goes) anxiously waiting ruralites. In this narrative, federal agencies stepped in after frustrating negotiations with power companies left rural America in the dark, artificially depressing the countryside and spurring urban migration.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;By contrast, Hirsh shows, the REA/TVA built on years of study by private utility coalitions. Private experiments extending power to sparsely populated communities and using electricity on farms were especially impressive, Hirsh argues, given the arm's-length interest in electricity at the time. Hirsh doesn't excuse the \"morally and legally ambiguous tactics\" that have provided fodder for more critical histories of the power industry (p. 227). But, he argues, these narratives obscure the work that private companies did prior to—as well as alongside—government programs. &lt;em&gt;Powering American Farms&lt;/em&gt; thus adds a utility-centered perspective to a small but growing literature that contests the common narrative of the REA/TVA as grassroots electric democracy and instead takes them seriously as federal bureaucracies with shifting national agendas (e.g., David Nye, &lt;em&gt;Electrifying America&lt;/em&gt;, 1990; Leah Glaser, &lt;em&gt;Electrifying the Rural American West&lt;/em&gt;, 2009; Brent Cebul, \"Creative Competition,\" 2018).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hirsh has been writing about the electricity industry for decades, and his deep familiarity with American electrification archives, both public and private, shines bright in this latest book: in a wealth of new stories about farmers' and agricultural engineers' experiments with energy sources and prac","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"241 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992 by Tilman Baumgärtel (review)","authors":"Katie Mackinnon","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920562","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992&lt;/em&gt; by Tilman Baumgärtel &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Katie Mackinnon (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992&lt;/em&gt; By Tilman Baumgärtel with Julien Weinert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 234. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\"&lt;/em&gt; provides a theoretical and historical framework for the development of &lt;em&gt;Piazza virtuale&lt;/em&gt;, an artist-run interactive television program that broadcast for one hundred days in the summer of 1992 and was organized by the artist group Van Gogh TV.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Baumgärtel suggests that \"Van Gogh TV's &lt;em&gt;Piazza virtuale&lt;/em&gt; inhabits its own unique space in the pre-history of internet culture, virtual communities and internet art\" (p. 13), which he demonstrates through a discussion of practices and policies that seem to preemptively mimic the same issues, policies, and debates in contemporary social media platforms.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;During the show, audience members would call in by phone, fax, or computer chat—embodying Brecht's \"radio theorie\" of consumers becoming producers of media content. The artists describe this as an attempt to introduce performance art with audience participation into the mass medium of television. However, maintaining an ethos of \"unhindered free expression\" on the open call-in line was challenged when a viewer insulted German chancellor Helmut Kohl live on air. The station then appointed Katrin Brinkmann, a freelancer in a \"low-level\" position, who became responsible for moderating calls and kicking people off the line should they express \"obscenities or political propaganda.\"&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Baumgärtel briefly compares Brinkmann's role and that of social media content moderation policies, which social media companies have been grappling with for over a decade. He similarly draws parallels to insidious workplace practices and corporate relationships in creative cultural industries, which were also present at Van Gogh TV, and draws attention to the ways in which camaraderie and creative passion seem to foster unjust labor &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 420]&lt;/strong&gt; conditions, such as long hours, hot rooms with minimal breaks, hierarchies of inequity, and gender-based discrimination. He quotes one of the founders, who states, \"The people we had were like racehorses. We always had to whip them to keep them running\" (p. 106).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Through these admissions, we can come to understand that, rather than providing much evidence that they invented social media, there was a culture present in the Federal Republic of Germany, as there was elsewhere, in which ideals of democracy and participation from the 1970s onward inspired the first steps into the newly discovered \"cyberspace.\" This discovery became enmeshed in politics of masculinist logics of creative freedom and control.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Other recent monographs h","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic by Özge Sezer (review)","authors":"Heinrich Hartmann","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920549","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic&lt;/em&gt; by Özge Sezer &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Heinrich Hartmann (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic&lt;/em&gt; By Özge Sezer. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023. Pp. 212. &lt;p&gt;Few elements of the history of the Turkish Republic have received as much attention in recent years as the topic of rural and village modernization. This is because village culture held a prominent place in the identity politics of the young Turkish state. Turkey is undoubtedly part of a broader picture here, and Özge Sezer's book &lt;em&gt;Forming the Modern Turkish Village&lt;/em&gt; does justice to the renaissance of village culture as more than &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 395]&lt;/strong&gt; a national phenomenon. She describes how it was anchored in Western sociological thought and practices of internal colonization, before demonstrating how the Kemalist regime built new Turkish identity politics on the idea of \"going towards Anatolian villages\" (p. 37 and following). Tools of this republican practice included the popular taking of \"village surveys\" and the so-called \"homeland excursions,\" meant to give urban intellectuals a new sense for the cultural cradle of Turkishness. One of the particularities in this Turkish mode of rural nation building was that it was not about showcasing the cultural diversity of the countryside. Instead, intellectuals tried to rebuild a homogenous, Turkified version of superior village culture, as opposed to the ethnically diverse Ottoman rural demographic realities. As such, the intellectual project of defining the village can never be detached from other, much more violent attempts of \"Turkifying\" the Anatolian population, especially the Armenian genocide, but also the forceful resettlement of Greek, Arabic, and Kurdish populations.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The biggest asset of this book is that Sezer systematically links resettlement politics with the well-known elements of village discourse in republican Turkey (she neglects however the works of Lamprou, Yilmaz, Adalet, and others on similar topics). Her particular emphasis on the program of model villages, which she develops primarily in the second part of her book, allows her to engage with a fairly technical and architectural discourse of engineering rural habitations. Sezer convincingly shows \"the state's housing agenda, concentrated on rural planning within urbanist concepts\" (p. 126), where villages and suburban neighborhoods differed by size but not by the guiding principles of their organization. Both addressed questions of the ideal housing facilities at affordable rates for the rural poor, including the provision of public services as well as hygienic and sanitation facilities, but also the question of how to \"rationalize\" a Turkic habitation culture, where the set","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond by Christina Dunbar-Hester (review)","authors":"Michael Camp","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920536","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond&lt;/em&gt; by Christina Dunbar-Hester &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Michael Camp (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond&lt;/em&gt; By Christina Dunbar-Hester. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. xiv + 252. &lt;p&gt;In an introduction, four body chapters, and a conclusion, Christina Dunbar-Hester offers an ecological and technological history of San Pedro Bay, the location of both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Although each of the body chapters focuses on organic life—birds, bananas, sea otters, and whales and dolphins, respectively—key to Dunbar-Hester's analysis is the concept of infrastructural vitalism, or the belief of proponents of industrial infrastructures that the systems they managed were, in some sense, themselves \"alive.\" This belief, according to Dunbar-Hester, came into violent conflict with the interests of genuine biological creatures. The magnitude of this clash intensified over time, for just as capitalism inexorably expands as broadly and deeply as it can, so do living beings reproduce and multiply. Dunbar-Hester's goal seems to be ultimately prescriptive, as she suggests at the end of the introduction that a deeper understanding of the historical relationships between industrial infrastructure and living creatures might help us create more sustainable and ecologically responsible forms of capitalism moving forward. Throughout the volume, abundant photographs help illustrate the subjects under consideration.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Dunbar-Hester's body chapters dive into more detail on how activities at the port implicated organic life. For example, leaks caused by oil drilling and transportation near the bay apparently became so prevalent that an oiled bird care facility arose to care for affected animals. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2019 proposed several ideas for restoring rock habitat shoreline for birds whose living spaces were ruined by oil, although many area residents were disappointed that none of the plans went far enough to satisfy their concerns. Regarding bananas, Dunbar-Hester notes that the Port of Long Beach created an entire terminal for the sole purpose of managing imports of the fruit, which arrived on refrigerated ships and were then trucked out on highways to other areas of the Golden State, which obviously used fossil fuels. However, bananas were later received at smaller ports in the region, as the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports focused more and more over time on accommodating massive ships carrying large metal shipping containers, which usually did not contain perishable items. Historians of technology will likely find this chapter the most interesting, as it includes detailed descriptions of pumpjacks, petcoke facilities, and other innovations used in oil extraction and re","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Modernism with a Soul\": Designing and Building Communities for Corporate and Civic Life","authors":"Stuart W. Leslie","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920528","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>This essay explores how film, feature and documentary, can offer a new perspective on modernist architecture, industrial design, and urban planning. Through the lens of two young directors, Kogonada and Davide Maffei, it traces the histories of two twentieth-century company towns: Ivrea, Italy, headquarters of Italian business machine giant Olivetti, and Columbus, Indiana, U.S.A., home to Cummins Inc., a global leader in diesel engine design and manufacturing. Adriano Olivetti and J. Irwin Miller shared the conviction that modernist architecture and design had a decisive role to play not just in the economic health of their respective firms but in the civic health of their surrounding communities. These companies have long abandoned the corporate idealism of their founding patrons. In film, Ivrea and Columbus have become architectural time capsules that raise important questions about the transformative power of architecture and design in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}