Technology and Culture最新文献

{"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":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History</em> by Burçe Çelik <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sirri Emrah Üçer (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History</em><br/> By Burçe Çelik. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. 254. <p>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 <em>Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa</em> (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.</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 1015]</strong> 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.</p> <p>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":"14 1","pages":""},"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}

{"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":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990</em> ed. by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Deac Rossell (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990</em><br/> Edited by Nelleke Teughels and Kaat Wils. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. Pp. 267. <p>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 <em>Faith in a Beam of Light</em> (2022; reviewed in the July 2023 issue of this journal) and before Kurt Vanhoutte and Leen Engelen’s <em>The Magic Lantern in Leisure, Entertainment and Popular Culture</em> (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).</p> <p>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, <em>Useful Cinema</em> (2011); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible’s wide-ranging <em>Learning with the Lights Off</em> (2012); Anne Quillien’s splendidly illustrated yet pedagogical <em>Lumineuses Projections!</em> (2016); and Martyn Jolly’s Australia-centric <em>The Magic Lantern at Work</em> (2020). <em>Learning with Light and Shadows</em> 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":"128 1","pages":""},"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}

{"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":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960</em> by Neil S. Oatsvall <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> E. Jerry Jessee (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960</em><br/> By Neil S. Oatsvall. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. 264. <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>Nature’s Economy</em> (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, <em>An Entangled Bank</em>, 1992; Rainger, “‘A Wonderful Oceanographic Tool,’” 2004). More recently, driven perhaps by our contemporary confrontation with the climate apocalypse, Jacob Darwin Hamblin (<em>Arming Mother Nature</em>, 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. <strong>[End Page 1059]</strong></p> <p>It is within this heady research that <em>Atomic Environments</em> 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":"34 1","pages":""},"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}

{"title":"Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica by Ignacio Siles (review)","authors":"Mónica Humeres","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926325","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica</em> by Ignacio Siles <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mónica Humeres (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica</em> By Ignacio Siles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 234. <p>What does it mean for people in a Latin American country to live in a datafied society? Bearing this question in mind, Ignacio Siles devoted five years to empirically study how people make sense of algorithms in Costa Rica, focusing on the use of three platforms: Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. In this book, situated at the intersection of classic communication studies, human-machine communication studies, and the history of digital cultures, Siles demonstrates how individuals interact within a logic of \"mutual domestication.\" Considering that algorithms are designed to gather information and platforms have the specific purpose of keeping users engaged, his research strives to show how users, far from being passive victims, also use these technologies for their own purposes.</p> <p>While the theoretical arguments against technological determinism that inspire this study (ch. 1) may not surprise historians of technology, the subsequent subjects at hand developed in the following chapters, will indeed be of inspiration as the empirical discussion illustrates how users can transform algorithmic agency, changing the direction and form in which technology operates, while it also intervenes in their cultural practices. The five dynamics of domestication, which give titles to chapters two through six, are conceptualized as personalization, integration, rituals, conversion, and resistance. They shed light on the specific ways in which individuals comprehend and interact with the algorithms of these platforms.</p> <p>Although the study is firmly rooted in Costa Rica's reality, it has relevance beyond this particular national context. While an increasing number of scholars recognize that the role of technology in social change cannot be assessed independently of its context of interpretation and use, most research continues to prioritize the history <em>of</em> algorithmic development. Thus, Siles's book can be seen as a complement to works like J. L. Chabert and E. Barbin's <em>A History of Algorithms</em> (1999) or E. Finn's <em>What Algorithms Want</em> (2017), contributing to the understanding of the complex relationships between algorithmic production, circulation, and consumption.</p> <p>Notably, Siles makes us consider that the appropriation of algorithms is built on the depths of the desire for connection, closeness, and two-sided communication. A wide range of illustrated cases leads us to think that users feel that the close relationship of mutual recognition between content creators and audiences, historically disrupted by mass media technology, is now being reassembled by these new algorithmic mediations. As ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939081","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":"Revolution and Resistance in the Desert: The Guggenheim System's Impact on Nitrate Mining and Society in Atacama, 1926–31","authors":"Damir Galaz-Mandakovic, Francisco Rivera","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926317","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>In 1926, during an economic crisis that severely impacted the mining industry, Guggenheim Brothers, the Guggenheim family business, implemented a new technological system to extract saltpeter from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Known as the Guggenheim system, this cutting-edge technological innovation had a significant impact on regional society and facilitated the introduction of Chilean saltpeter into the global fertilizer market. For this system to succeed, however, it had to incorporate a sociopolitical strategy based on a highly hierarchical and well-controlled labor force. Through their political and cultural influence in the region, the Guggenheim family's industry transformed a remote area into a state periphery, creating new ways of inhabiting the desert within a strict framework in which workers' lives were regulated by company-imposed labor discipline. With more political power than the state, the Guggenheim family sought to suppress any social agency deemed dangerous to the production of saltpeter.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939082","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":"Tropicalizing the Portable Radio: Electronics and the U.S. Military's Battle against Fungi in the Pacific War","authors":"Boyd Ruamcharoen","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926313","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>As the U.S. military became embroiled in \"jungle warfare\" across the Pacific during World War II, it was caught off guard by the rapid deterioration of materials and equipment in the tropics, where the air was hot, humid, and teeming with fungal spores. This article tells the story of how American scientists and engineers understood the \"tropical deterioration\" of portable radios and electronics and developed techniques to counteract it. Examining scientific efforts to prevent tropical decay reveals how exposure to tropical conditions during World War II shaped the development of portable electronics. Contributing to envirotech history and environmental media studies, this article uncovers the importance of climate proofing to the history of electronics miniaturization. Tropical deterioration, furthermore, provides a technology-focused lens for enriching our historical understanding of the tropics as an environmental imaginary.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939231","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":"Cover Essay: La Gente, Controllers of the Universe","authors":"Peter Soland","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926310","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>Diego Rivera's mural <i>El hombre controlador del universo</i> (1934) can be read as foreshadowing the anxieties and optimisms about atomic power that shaped popular culture in Mexico during the nuclear age. In epic fashion, Rivera's vision affirms the agency of ordinary people in the face of a technological epoch while eerily anticipating the bipolarity of the Cold War, themes that would be revisited by Julián Soler in his film <i>Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida</i> (1969), which bears out the prophecy of Rivera's mural.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"191 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939241","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":"El sol al servicio de la humanidad: Historia de la energía solar en Chile [The sun in the service of humanity: History of solar energy in Chile] ed. by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva (review)","authors":"Diego Arango López","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926322","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;El sol al servicio de la humanidad: Historia de la energía solar en Chile [The sun in the service of humanity: History of solar energy in Chile]&lt;/em&gt; ed. by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Diego Arango López (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;El sol al servicio de la humanidad: Historia de la energía solar en Chile [The sun in the service of humanity: History of solar energy in Chile]&lt;/em&gt; Edited by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva. Santiago de Chile: RIL editores, 2019. Pp. 218. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;El sol al servicio de la humanidad&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Mauricio Osses, Cecilia Ibarra, and Bárbara Silva, proposes a general history of the sun in Chile. It has 218 pages in eight chapters written by twelve different authors. This diversity is, precisely, one of the main assets of the book. However, this collective nature also causes its main weaknesses. In general, the book addresses the social, scientific, and technological relationship between a part of Chilean society and the sun, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. To introduce the book, the editors point out that in response to the current global climate crisis, societies are actively seeking new forms of nonfossil energies. This has renewed attention to solar energy and especially to photovoltaic technology. And recently, this has stimulated the interest for historical research on the relationship between human beings and their energy sources.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, beyond the traditional claim of interdisciplinarity in collective works, the book does not explicitly clarify how it addresses the epistemological challenges of working from disciplines as dissimilar as history and engineering. Indeed, the main unresolved challenge of the book is to generate a theoretically coherent argument beyond the interpretative and methodological differences of each author.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In two short chapters, Nelson Arellano Escudero elaborates the book's most compelling argument. His research proposes a four-stage periodization of the history of solar energy in Chile and demonstrates that, from its first moments on a global scale, Chile made important contributions to the global field of solar energy in terms of ideas, knowledge, and the circulation of scientists. Moreover, he proposes an epistemological and methodological approach that he calls \"intersected scales,\" which allows him to rigorously assume the multidimensionality of the factors that intervene in the history of solar energy. In fact, this author clearly demonstrates that the simple availability of diverse technologies to \"harvest\" the sun did not guarantee the development of a sustainable solar energy industry. He argues that the reasons for the underdevelopment of solar technologies in Chile are not technological, scientific, or even natural; on the contrary, they are cultural and social. Thus, the research stresses that the reproduction ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939400","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":"Transparency: The Material History of an Idea by Daniel Jütte (review)","authors":"Kjetil Fallan","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926338","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;Transparency: The Material History of an Idea&lt;/em&gt; by Daniel Jütte &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Kjetil Fallan (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Transparency: The Material History of an Idea&lt;/em&gt; By Daniel Jütte. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 512. &lt;p&gt;The scope of Daniel Jütte's material history of the idea of transparency is daunting and might at first seem excessively so. Covering antiquity to the present, and with no clear-cut geographical demarcation, the study is instead defined by a single idea and a single material. Immediately narrowing it down further to equate glass with plate glass, or more precisely glass windows, and declaring that the idea of \"transparency first and foremost has been an architectural experience\" (p. 6), the project takes on more manageable—but no less impressive—dimensions. For students of material culture, this quick sidelining of nonarchitectural vitreous transparency (think of eyeglasses, drinking vessels, lighting fixtures, etc.) can appear slightly dismissive but ultimately comes off as justifiable in the name of coherency and clarity of argument.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;A key ambition of this book is to problematize the teleological bent of conventional narratives of how glass windows became a defining feature of our built environment. This is pursued chiefly by reconceptualizing the historical development of architectural glass as a complex movement of ebbs and flows, of fits and starts, of forces and counterforces. It is a long and winding road Jütte guides us along. Technological advances in the production of plate glass are given due attention, but the book places greater significance on the social, aesthetic, and material values assigned to glass when explaining its changing status. We learn that when glass was first used to seal windows in ancient Rome, it was a niche product primarily applied in bath houses, where it was particularly important to let light in without letting heat out. But it was a very different kind of building that for centuries would become the main arena for the discourse on architectural glass: the church. In explaining the extraordinary role of glass windows in church architecture, Jütte turns to the dogma of \"divine light\" in Christian theology. Crucially, the function of glass windows in churches was to let that light into the room, not to provide views of the outside. The equation of architectural glass with transparency in the metaphorical sense would have to await the emergence of glass windows one could actually see through, as well as the increasing articulation of \"openness\" as an intellectual ideal from the Reformation to the Enlightenment onward. Jütte navigates these open waters in confident and convincing ways, and he skillfully draws on a vast array of source material, from travelogues and architectural treaties to poetry and marketing material.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;One of the book's great strengths is the way it shows how ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140942465","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 Theater of Electricity: Technology and Spectacle in the Late 19th Century by Ulf Otto (review)","authors":"Sarah Kriger","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926352","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;The Theater of Electricity: Technology and Spectacle in the Late 19th Century&lt;/em&gt; by Ulf Otto &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Sarah Kriger (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Theater of Electricity: Technology and Spectacle in the Late 19th Century&lt;/em&gt; By Ulf Otto. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2023. Pp. xxvii + 314. &lt;p&gt;Ulf Otto's &lt;em&gt;The Theater of Electricity&lt;/em&gt; examines a wide range of electrical presentations and technologies in use on the western European stage in the titular time period. Geographically, Otto examines mainly German cases, although the book also covers certain performances in France and England. His case studies include examples from opera, spectacular theater, dance, and technological exhibitions. Using these, Otto analyzes how electrical technologies, such as carbon-arc and incandescent lights, were integrated into and developed within theatrical material culture and how famous performances involving these and other technologies both influenced and were influenced by the cultural meaning of this new source of power. He is interested in particular in what he calls the \"aesthetic regime\" of electricity, which makes it possible to reconcile then-developing modernism with industrial materiality by permitting audiences and artists to avoid directly perceiving the labor that made electrical power possible.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Otto shows the collaborative influences of theater, culture, and electrical technologies through eclectic historical examples; in fact, &lt;em&gt;The Theater of Electricity&lt;/em&gt; often feels densely packed with these examples, each one seeming as though it could be expanded into a more detailed study. He draws on a rich variety of primary and secondary sources, exploring his thesis from many angles. Importantly, he is careful not only to describe the effects of electrical technologies on audiences and performers but also to integrate the backstage engineers and technicians to provide a fuller picture.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;However, for scholars who focus on the technological, not the theatrical, this wide-ranging approach is sometimes disorienting. This is in part because the author aims this book at an audience familiar with histories of theater but less so with histories of technology. His historiological purpose, he explains, is to criticize the tendency of history of theater to treat science and technology as distinct entities developed in the world outside the theater and then adapted for theatrical practice. Instead, he argues through example, performance histories must regard theater and technologies as interconnected, each influencing the other within the larger context of social, cultural, and economical changes. He explicitly incorporates approaches learned from histories of technology, such as Morus's work on electrical demonstrations in Victorian England, and integrates STS concepts, such as Latour's actor-network theory. Because Otto assumes readers' background in historiographie","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926362","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}