{"title":"On the Cover: Seeing Like a New Materialist.","authors":"Jan Hansen","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965817","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965817","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rather than treating visual sources as mere documentary evidence, this essay emphasizes their active role in constructing truth. Using a 1914 photograph of Los Angeles as a case study, the essay demonstrates how new materialists can critically engage with visual sources in both research and teaching to examine how they shape meaning. It argues that images are uniquely suited to reveal the entanglements between humans and nonhumans while capturing unintended details often overlooked in textual sources. Photographs, in particular, offer a compelling means to convey abstract concepts-such as matter's vitality and creativity-in a more accessible form.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"611-621"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734867","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":"Delivering Airpower: How Innovation in Wartime Foreshadowed Modern Supply Chain Strategies.","authors":"Peter Dye","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Modern supply chains claim novel levels of resilience and adaptability, but these were developed in World War I (and later redeployed during World War II) and have been \"reinvented\" in contemporary business contexts. This article highlights how the supply chains developed for wartime aviation logistics anticipated today's notions of supply chain resilience and adaptability. While the logistic innovations of World War II are widely recognized, those developed during World War I, particularly in aviation, are less well known but equally groundbreaking. The Royal Flying Corps pioneered agile supply chain strategies that sustained continuous air superiority on the Western Front-helping break the stalemate of trench warfare. Innovations such as postponement, strategic warehousing, bidirectional supply, recycling, circular manufacturing, and product service systems addressed the challenges of high attrition, technological advancement, and unpredictable demand.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"209-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383583","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":"The Safari and the Screen: How Visual Technologies Shaped Italian Colonial Narratives.","authors":"Beatrice Falcucci, Gianmarco Mancosu","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent historiography on empire and postcolonialism has highlighted the diverse visual practices and technologies that shaped colonial narratives and knowledge. This article examines how various visual media were used to advance Italy's imperial agenda, drawing on both recent scholarship and original research. Introducing the concept of transmediality and its methodological importance for analyzing colonial cultural and visual practices, the article presents the case of Vittorio Tedesco Zammarano-an explorer, hunter, filmmaker, and writer active in Italian Somalia. Through a close examination of the technologies and cultural practices, this study reflects on how colonial fantasies, desires, and epistemes-particularly those related to hunting and safari-were intertwined with Fascist Italy's colonial ambitions, highlighting broader trans-imperial connections.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"71-105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383581","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":"Dynamics of Doubt: How ASHRAE Engineers Became Ozone Skeptics, 1974-89.","authors":"Abeer Saha","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and its response to the ozone crisis in the 1970s, highlighting the science-skepticism that hindered responses to environmental issues in the twentieth century. Although well-positioned to address ozone depletion by developing safer chemical alternatives, ASHRAE resisted regulatory changes, framing concerns over CFC emissions as an attack on engineering and American technological dominance. Their rhetoric of doubt persisted for over a decade, even after corporations like DuPont acknowledged environmental harm and adopted chlorofluorocarbon controls. This study reveals how skepticism within scientifically literate communities can complicate environmental responses and explores the role of professional identity in shaping environmental and technical policy decisions.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"135-160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383587","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":"Erratum.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965867","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965867","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734860","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":"Telehospitality.","authors":"Lynn Spigel","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay explores computer profiling and surveillance systems developed by the hospitality industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Hotels and motels partnered with computer corporations and were among the first industries to create computer networks and management systems, using them for practical applications like reservations as well as to police guests and monitor hotel labor. However, there is no sustained history of the hospitality industry's role in computer research and design. Drawing on archival documents, trade journals, architectural literature, and hotel ephemera, this article shows how hospitality venues made computer profiling and surveillance seem welcoming, convenient, and user-friendly. The computer systems developed for hotels helped acclimate publics to the networked environments of contemporary everyday life, where digital devices and services ambiguously care for and surveil consumers, even in their own homes.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"39-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143383525","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":"Making Homemakers Responsible for Safety: Housework, Laundry Equipment, and the Unequal Burdens of Accident Prevention, C. 1910-80.","authors":"Alexander I Parry","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a956850","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article investigates how twentieth-century U.S. corporations, nonprofit safety experts, and engineers came together to control the risks of home laundry equipment. Professionals worked with citizen-consumers in the U.S. to form a voluntary safety system intended to prevent injuries using education, markets for \"safe\" appliances, and consumer product testing. This system catered to informed middle-class families and relied on the principles of personal responsibility and free enterprise. Although home safety measures decreased fatal accidents, they disproportionately added to the workloads of contemporary homemakers and reinforced existing gender and class inequities. This article argues that these inequities set the stage for later government intervention, offering new insights into the intersections between consumer technology, domestic labor, and regulation. Resituating the history of safety from workplaces and transportation networks to the home, this article shows how injury prevention influenced how Americans shopped for and used potentially dangerous laundry machines.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"411-447"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144043338","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":"Where Research Meets Place: Iron, Identity, and the Reshaping of Historical Inquiry in Arctic Sweden.","authors":"Kristina Söderholm, Carina Bennerhag","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965818","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965818","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how place-based dynamics reshape historical research, drawing on a retrospective analysis of a project on 2,200-year-old iron metallurgy in Arctic Sweden. Findings of advanced ironworking among ancient hunter-gatherers challenged dominant center-periphery narratives and exposed the influence of ongoing marginalization in Sweden's far north. The research was redirected by local histories, Indigenous and minority politics, and resource extraction legacies, particularly affecting the Sámi as well as other minorities. By tracing how place altered the research trajectory, the article highlights the entanglement of knowledge production with postcolonial struggles for recognition. It argues for the broader relevance of place in shaping historical inquiry across disciplines.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"623-647"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734870","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":"How Standards Became Documents: Uniform Screw Threads and Standardization in the Age of Industrial Print.","authors":"Jonathan H Grossman","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965819","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a965819","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the nineteenth century, the process of creating standards became part of a burgeoning engineering print culture. Long before their institutionalization in standards institutes in the early twentieth century, standards evolved into a print genre-one that has remained largely invisible in historical accounts. This article recovers this print history of standards. I argue that in Joseph Whitworth's On an Uniform System of Screw Threads (1841) the genre coalesces dialogically. It descended from eighteenth-century engineering reports that documented completed works, and it contended with contemporary engineering papers that conveyed experimental results or derived best practices. In proposing a potential consensus for manufacturing screws to uniform specifications, the genre assumed the print dissemination of a standard could serve as a collective and public path towards a standard. At the same time, its rhetorical structure aimed to present the standard not as a prescription but as a record of existing practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 3","pages":"649-673"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144734863","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":"Crafting with the Integrated Circuit: How Material Culture Shaped Hobbyist Innovation.","authors":"Kayleigh Perkov","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a956848","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article investigates how the development of the integrated circuit (IC) and the solderless breadboard reshaped the practices of electronics hobbyists during the 1960s and 1970s. As the IC became a black box that obscured its internal workings, hobbyists turned to periodicals and hands-on tools like the breadboard to navigate this shift. The breadboard fostered a \"sketch-like\" approach to electronic design, emphasizing creativity and iterative learning. By tracing these transformations, the article argues that this period fundamentally shaped contemporary understandings of innovation by highlighting the dynamic interplay between hands-on skill and emerging technologies.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"357-379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144041879","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}