{"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":"On the Cover: The Politics of Seeing Pregnancy.","authors":"Agata Ignaciuk, María Jesús Santesmases","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971297","DOIUrl":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971297","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Frida Kahlo's artistic rendering of childbirth appears on the cover of this issue of Technology and Culture. This essay invites readers to view the history of medicine and technology through images, by tracing multi-sited genealogies of their visual cultures. The shifting representations of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion can enrich historical research and teaching on twentieth-century reproductive biomedicine by foregrounding how images produce, circulate, and contest knowledge and power. Yet the different meanings attributed to the same image in different cultures and political regimes underscore that they cannot be fully understood without their historiography and their political work as visual artifacts.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"937-957"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330710","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":"You Heard it Here First: Podcasts as a Tool for Public History.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a971304","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"1141-1144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330659","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":"Proving Grounds: How Saudi Arabia Shaped Computer Aided Design Tools Used by American Architects, 1967-83.","authors":"Aaron Tobey","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a971298","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article reinterprets the early history of computer-aided design (CAD) by relocating its development from U.S. labs to transnational building sites in Saudi Arabia. Drawing on unpublished project records and planning documents, the article shows how American architectural firms working on Saudi-funded megaprojects shaped the routines, software, and visual language of CAD. By framing CAD as a product of geopolitical negotiation-rather than technical inevitability-this article unsettles dominant digital-turn narratives. This analysis contributes to architectural history, STS, and digital studies by demonstrating how design tools emerged through the entanglement of labor, software, and political ambition.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"959-990"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330667","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":"Beyond Megaprojects: How Small-Scale Innovation Managed the Water in Northern Jiangsu, 1957-87.","authors":"Yichuan Chen","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a971300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a971300","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article challenges the dominant focus on megaprojects in Chinese water management by uncovering a parallel history of small-scale, multifunctional water infrastructure in rural Jiangsu. Based on archival research and fieldwork, the article documents how local engineers, working beyond the gaze of the central state, embedded competing aesthetic and ideological visions-high modernism, revolutionary design, and vernacular innovation-into technical landscapes. This shift reframes water infrastructure not as a top-down imposition but as a product of localized creativity and negotiation. The article contributes to infrastructure studies and Chinese history by re-scaling development and decentering state narratives.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 4","pages":"1025-1056"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145330721","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}