Technology and Culture最新文献_第4页

Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960 by Neil S. Oatsvall (review) 原子环境：核技术、自然世界与决策，1945-1960 年》，尼尔-S-奥茨瓦尔著（评论）

IF 0.7 3区哲学

Technology and Culture Pub Date : 2024-07-19 DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a933137

E. Jerry Jessee

{"title":"Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960 by Neil S. Oatsvall (review)","authors":"E. Jerry Jessee","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933137","url":null,"abstract":" Reviewed by: <ul> <li> Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960 by Neil S. Oatsvall </li> <li> E. Jerry Jessee (bio) </li> </ul> Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960 By Neil S. Oatsvall. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. 264. The world was irrevocably changed on July 16, 1945, when the Manhattan Project detonated the world’s first atomic bomb (Trinity) in the desert of central New Mexico. Three weeks later Hiroshima lay in ruins, strikingly demonstrating the devastating power that scientists had managed to wrest from the atom. In the eighty years since Trinity, historians have produced a vast literature documenting how efforts to confront a future of apocalyptic nuclear weaponry utterly transformed society and politics. One major consequence of the nuclear apocalyptic imaginary, as Donald Worster noted, was the rise of environmental consciousness: “The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945,” he memorably declared in Nature’s Economy (1977). Since then, scholars have deepened Worster’s formulation of the connections between the atomic age and the age of ecology by showing how scientists’ eagerness to work with nuclear technologies shaped the growth and influence of the “environmental sciences” (Hagen, An Entangled Bank, 1992; Rainger, “‘A Wonderful Oceanographic Tool,’” 2004). More recently, driven perhaps by our contemporary confrontation with the climate apocalypse, Jacob Darwin Hamblin (Arming Mother Nature, 2013), Joseph Masco (“Bad Weather,” 2010), and Matthias Dörries (“The Politics of Atmospheric Sciences,” 2011) have suggested compellingly that the perceived world-altering power of nuclear weaponry provided a critical context through which visions of global environmental vulnerability, planetary threat, and perhaps the very idea of the “global environment” came to be. [End Page 1059] It is within this heady research that Atomic Environments offers an examination of the interplay between nuclear technologies and the environment from the origins of the bomb to 1960. The book opens in the Nevada desert with the 1953 Encore test to illustrate “how environmental considerations impacted the development of the US nuclear program” (p. 3). For this test, officials uprooted 145 ponderosa trees and placed them in concrete footings to simulate a forest, which was leveled when Encore detonated a mile away. Destroying the constructed forest informed weapons testers’ understanding of the bomb. “Ecological knowledge,” Oatsvall claims, “. . . buttressed nuclear science” (p. 2). The main thrust of the book, however, centers much less on the scientists who utilized nuclear technologies to construct knowledge of the environment. The book does not ma","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743500","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}

引用次数: 0

Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History by Burçe Çelik (review) 土耳其和奥斯曼帝国的通信：Burçe Çelik撰写的《一部批判性的历史》（评论）

IF 0.7 3区哲学

Technology and Culture Pub Date : 2024-07-19 DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a933114

Sirri Emrah Üçer

{"title":"Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History by Burçe Çelik (review)","authors":"Sirri Emrah Üçer","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933114","url":null,"abstract":" Reviewed by: <ul> <li> Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History by Burçe Çelik </li> <li> Sirri Emrah Üçer (bio) </li> </ul> Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History By Burçe Çelik. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. 254. Burçe Çelik’s book represents a novel and bold contribution to the field of Turkish studies by providing a comprehensive two-century-long history of telecommunications. Instead of focusing on individual networks, she introduces a conceptual framework that unifies singular networks within a temporal continuity. This contribution brings to mind Horwitz’s Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa (2006), as Çelik adds topics of ownership and the development of material telecommunications infrastructure to the discursive analysis of communication. Her study is also in close resonance with the accounts of other critical Turkish communication scholars like Haluk Geray and Funda Başaran. The strength of the book comes from its long-term and multinetwork approach to Ottoman/Turkish communications/telecommunications history. However, this also exposes some areas open to criticism. Çelik’s analytical framework comprises both geopolitical and social elements. The geopolitical aspect encompasses topics such as the peripheralization of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the global capitalist division of labor, the material development of the telecommunications network, and the shift in ownership from the government to international companies. The social element of Çelik’s analysis divides Ottoman/Turkish history into two periods: what she calls the “non-capitalist modernization” before 1950 and the “transition to capitalism” after World War II. The social element also introduces “silenced communities,” including Armenians, Kurds, women (particularly working-class women), and progressive youth, as key actors in communication history, beyond the more prominent “noisy actors” such as the state, military, political elites, and “top-down” modernizers. Çelik argues that the “non-capitalist modernism” of the late Ottoman and early [End Page 1015] Republican periods was closely linked to reform efforts aimed at restoring the “circle of justice” within a social context characterized by an “oriental political society” where communities opposed the government, rather than a “Western-style civil society” with individuals opposing the government. Çelik introduces the concept of “capitalist imperialism” and mentions “noisy actors” such as international companies and organizations. However, her proximity to a political stance that views the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic as a militarist colonizer rather than a passive periphery limits the role assigned to international capital markets, companies, and organizations in the geopolitics of telecomm","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743485","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}

引用次数: 0

Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils (review) 用光影学习：教育灯笼和电影放映，1860-1990 年》，Nelleke Teughels 和 Kaat Wils 编辑（评论）

IF 0.7 3区哲学

Technology and Culture Pub Date : 2024-07-19 DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a933126

Deac Rossell

{"title":"Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils (review)","authors":"Deac Rossell","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933126","url":null,"abstract":" Reviewed by: <ul> <li> Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils </li> <li> Deac Rossell (bio) </li> </ul> Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990 Edited by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. Pp. 267. The second of three books spawned by the nationally funded B-Magic collaborations between six universities in Belgium, arriving just after Sabine Lenk and Natalija Majsova’s Faith in a Beam of Light (2022; reviewed in the July 2023 issue of this journal) and before Kurt Vanhoutte and Leen Engelen’s The Magic Lantern in Leisure, Entertainment and Popular Culture (forthcoming), this volume with its two companions also announces the new Media Performance Histories series, as part of the Techne collection at Brepols Publishers. Concentrating on the classroom use of projected images in Belgium, this anthology follows its funded mandate with brief excursions to Switzerland, Britain, and Austria, which are academically funded separately. Very little context is given here to magic lantern culture before the founding of Belgium in 1830, and minimal attention is paid to pedagogical concepts used outside the country’s borders, so public lectures are recognized here as a dominant popular educational practice only in the second half of the nineteenth century (p. 51), and most institutional links are to the Belgian phenomena of university extensions and popular universities. True for Belgium, but this leaves aside other histories like that of the Mechanics’ Institutes in Britain, which began in the first half of the century with some 700 active institutes, serving over 120,000 members by 1851. Equally, the focus here on magic lantern slide projection disregards the optical bench used in many classrooms, a kind of disassembled magic lantern that supported projection of a variety of experiments as well as lantern slides, a common instrument in the period under examination, but which only appears in the book after 1919 in the teaching of Robert Pohl at Göttingen University (ch. 7). Several chapter authors note there is only a sparse literature relevant to the themes of the book, all of which are anthologies that are cited when relevant, including Charles Ackland and Haidee Wasson’s study of nontheatrical but not necessarily educational films, Useful Cinema (2011); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible’s wide-ranging Learning with the Lights Off (2012); Anne Quillien’s splendidly illustrated yet pedagogical Lumineuses Projections! (2016); and Martyn Jolly’s Australia-centric The Magic Lantern at Work (2020). Learning with Light and Shadows has some advantages over these prior works in its more concentrated focus, and it supplies much new specific literature that wi","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743495","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}

引用次数: 0

Nazi Volksgemeinschaft Technology: Gottfried Feder, Fritz Todt, and the Plassenburg Spirit by John C. Guse (review) 纳粹人民团体技术：戈特弗里德-费德、弗里茨-托特和普拉森堡精神》，约翰-C-古塞著（评论）

IF 0.8 3区哲学

Technology and Culture Pub Date : 2024-07-01 DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a933121

Klaus Hentschel

引用次数: 0

Engineering Trouble: US-Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent, 1905–1945 by Thorben Pelzer (review) 工程问题：Thorben Pelzer 著，《美中职业不满的经历，1905-1945 年》（评论）

IF 0.8 3区哲学

Technology and Culture Pub Date : 2024-07-01 DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a933107

Delphine Spicq

引用次数: 0

Let There Be Light: How Electricity Made Modern Hong Kong by Mark L. Clifford (review) Let There Be Light: How Electricity Made Modern Hong Kong》，Mark L. Clifford 著（评论）