Technology and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures by Dirk van Laak (review)","authors":"Maria Paula Diogo","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926333","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures</em> by Dirk van Laak <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Maria Paula Diogo (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructures</em> By Dirk van Laak and translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 314. <p>The richness of Dirk van Laak's book (originally published as <em>Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft—Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur</em>, 2018) can be easily grasped from the preface written by the author for the English version. The time that has passed between the German and English versions is five years. Under normal conditions, that would not be long; but the turbulence of this period and the events that took place during it deeply changed our relationship with society, nature, science, and technology.</p> <p>In this context, the concept of infrastructure acquired new layers and emphasized its structuring role in the design of contemporary society. Infrastructures shape territories both as geographical and political categories, defining both their internal dynamics and hierarchies in terms of management and use of resources and the relationships among national powers. Cables, railways, roads, airports, energy, water, sanitation, and the internet—in a nutshell, infrastructures—are at the core of our networked world and the sheer possibility of them failing makes us deeply worried and exposed to an uncomfortable fragility.</p> <p>If these are the guiding lines of van Laak's analysis of the role of infrastructures and their entanglement with the various dimensions of society at large, the author's approach concerning actors takes us to the anonymous history of practitioners, far from a history of the so-called great figures. This book focuses mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a foray into the twenty-first century; with regards to the geographic scope, the author uses multiple scales—urban, national, and global—to access the transnational dimension of the main infrastructures and the way they act as tools of centralization and decentralization.</p> <p><em>Lifelines of Our Society</em> begins with an introduction in which the author explains and discusses the assumptions of his research—largely summarized in the paragraphs above—including a very interesting disciplinary overview of the meaning of the concept of infrastructure. Once the conceptual and methodological structure underlying the work has been established, the author dedicates the two following chapters to the analysis of the leading <strong>[End Page 699]</strong> infrastructures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: public works related to collective transport of people and goods (canals and railways) and electricity and individual mobility, respectively. This analysis is built as an interactive puzzle—which includes a set of \"alternative routes\" that look at inf","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939069","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":"Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America] ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia (review)","authors":"Mario Peters","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926330","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America]</em> ed. by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mario Peters (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica [Thinking about infrastructures in Latin America]</em> Edited by Dhan Zunino Singh, Valeria Gruschetsky, and Melina Piglia. Buenos Aires: Teseopress, 2022. Pp. 308. <p><em>Pensar las infraestructuras en Latinoamérica</em> is an important contribution to the study of infrastructure in Latin America, a field that has been flourishing over the last decade or so (M. Lasso, <em>Erased</em>, 2019; S. W. Miller, <em>The Street Is Ours</em>, 2018; F. Schulze, <em>Wissen im Fluss</em>, 2022). The book includes fourteen chapters by historians and scholars from neighboring disciplines. It brings together essays on transportation infrastructure—including railways, roads, and airports—water infrastructure, and urban infrastructure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This broad approach to infrastructure and the focus on the past <em>and</em> the present in a single volume is indeed something new. In regional terms, the book focuses largely on South America, especially Argentina, while Mexico and Central America figure less prominently.</p> <p>The book is of interest to historians of technology because the authors aim to explore how infrastructures create relations between society, technology, the state, culture, politics, and nature. Naturally, some chapters achieve this aim more fully than others. The authors all focus on the role of the state in the planning and administration of infrastructures, which gives the volume coherence. One strength of the book lies in the profound examination of tensions, conflicts, and failures. This is important because in Latin America, <strong>[End Page 693]</strong> infrastructures have long been promoted as harbingers of modernization and progress, while in fact the often-precarious state of infrastructure reflects pressing problems like poverty and extreme social inequality.</p> <p>The chapters written by Anahí Ballent (ch. 8) and Melina Piglia (ch. 13) explicitly address the gap between the promise of infrastructure and reality on the ground. In her essay on the Río Tercero Dam (Argentina), Ballent analyzes how in 1910, early proposals described the dam as a key instrument in socio-territorial transformation, promising to make irrigation in an arid region possible, which in turn was supposed to stimulate settlement and agriculture. By 1935, it was clear that such plans had not worked out, and the dam was now promoted as important to produce hydropower. In her essay, Piglia shows that the modernization of airports became a priority in Argentinean politics in the 1960s, while conditions on the ground remained precarious. Runways, illumination, communication technologies, and m","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":"140939151","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":"Water, Wealth, and Engineering Wisdom: Shaping Tucumán's Agricultural Future, 1890–1910","authors":"Carlos Salvador Dimas","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926318","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>Focusing on Argentina's sugarcane province of Tucumán from 1870 to 1910, this article examines the processes of engineering professionalization in Argentina and its application to pressing environmental problems. Engineers were central to the processes through which elites in Latin America sought to attract foreign investment in agriculture, integrate their countries into the global economy, and provide expertise that enabled states to advance a techno-scientific imaginary based on liberal economic progress. Progressive bureaucrats and engineers, such as civil engineer Carlos Wauters, believed that they could use hydraulic infrastructure to transform Tucumán from an agricultural monoculture to a polyculture; others believed that infrastructure should be used to support a sugar monoculture. In exploring this issue, this article bridges the fields of engineering history, agricultural history, and environmental history. It also incorporates Latin America into global scholarship on the emergence and evolution of professional engineering.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939157","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":"Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950 by Germán Vergara, and: Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City by Diana J. Montaño (review)","authors":"Helge Wendt","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926326","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;Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950&lt;/em&gt; by Germán Vergara, and: &lt;em&gt;Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City&lt;/em&gt; by Diana J. Montaño &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Helge Wendt (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950&lt;/em&gt; By Germán Vergara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 322. &lt;em&gt;Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City&lt;/em&gt; By Diana J. Montaño. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 373. &lt;p&gt;Energy history is back in fashion. As environmental history and in light of the Anthropocene, it participates in global historical debates. This environmental history of energy system transformations is the subject of Germán Vergara's &lt;em&gt;Fueling Mexico&lt;/em&gt;. Based on the example of Mexico from 1850 to 1950, it looks at the diverse transformations of the Mexican energy system and increases in fossil fuels. The book analyzes structural shifts, the long-term effects of which shaped politics and power dynamics. A second aspect of current energy history looks at sociocultural dynamics. Energy history is no longer written from the perspective of entrepreneurs and large, ever-expanding corporations alone. Instead, as Diana Montaño points out in &lt;em&gt;Electrifying Mexico&lt;/em&gt;, conditions such as everyday culture, contexts of use, and (rather Foucauldian) novel discourses are equally important for the diffusion of new technologies.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;These two studies of Mexico's energy modernity could not be more different. In Vergara's book, the entire country is scrutinized; in Montaño's, the expanding juggernaut of the capital is the focus. Vergara considers the modernization process from the aspect of material conditions and places coal and petroleum at the center. Montaño meets the public debating culture head on, refraining from an investigation of technical innovations or preconditions, instead focusing entirely on the users and collateral damage. Indeed, the detailed presentation of accidents caused by electric streetcars, complete with police and court records as well as newspaper and magazine reports, shows the full range of social discourse in the dynamics of appropriation and (sometimes fatal) application.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Vergara's study is a journey through Mexico from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The environmental history of Mexican society is also a history of knowledge about geology, focusing on coal and petroleum. Part of Vergara's account is already known from the work of, for instance, María del Mar Rubio's article from 2010 on the economic history of Mexican oil in the first third of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the perspective taken in this book on the transformations of the Mexican energy system in this long period is particularly innovative. Also, it is beneficial to follow Vergara's accentuation of the regional transformations. These were driven","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939377","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":"Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present by Karsten Uhl (review)","authors":"Marcus Popplow","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926356","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;Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present&lt;/em&gt; by Karsten Uhl &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Marcus Popplow (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present&lt;/em&gt; By Karsten Uhl. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. 280. &lt;p&gt;Karsten Uhl's volume is, indeed, \"the first English-language book specifically on the role of technology in German history\" (p. 1). Such an endeavor is more than welcome as, so far, introductions to and surveys of the history of technology focusing explicitly or implicitly on Germany have all been published in German. This is true for Joachim Radkau's &lt;em&gt;Technik in Deutschland&lt;/em&gt; (1989), the five-volume &lt;em&gt;Propyläen Technikgeschichte&lt;/em&gt; (1990–92), Wolfgang König's &lt;em&gt;Technikgeschichte&lt;/em&gt; (2009), Martina Heßler's &lt;em&gt;Kulturgeschichte der Technik&lt;/em&gt; (2012), Ulrich Wengenroth's &lt;em&gt;Technik der Moderne&lt;/em&gt; (2015), and &lt;em&gt;Provokationen der Technikgeschichte&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Martina Heßler and Heike Weber (2019). None of these works has been translated into English, so they have remained inaccessible for non-German readers so far—at least until powerful and easily accessible translation tools have been devised more recently. It is somewhat astonishing that Uhl does not refer to these surveys in more detail and mentions most of them, if at all, only in passing, even if his own approach throughout the book is based on a wide range of secondary literature. As the annotated bibliography also focuses on English titles only, readers are not made familiar with the historiography of German research into the history of technology.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;According to the requirements of the Bloomsbury History of Modern Germany Series, the book is divided into a first part, \"Tracing the History,\" which is rather descriptive, while the second part covers \"New Directions\"; that is, the results of more recent historiographical and methodological discussions. The reader should thus not expect a chronological account of the history of technology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, nor an overview structured according to various sectors of technology. Uhl instead loosely pairs the chapters of the first and second parts, so that \"traditional\" issues correspond with more explorative ones: \"industrialization\" with the \"human body in highly technified environments,\" \"urban\" with \"rural technologies,\" \"high tech\" (aviation, rocketry, nuclear power) with \"everyday technologies,\" and \"visions of progress\" with \"apprehensions of uncertainty\"—in the sense of protest against technologies and the emergence of environmental concerns. The latter pair shows, however, that Uhl to some &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 744]&lt;/strong&gt; extent subverts this structure, as \"visions of progress\" so far have not featured in the standard program of introductions into the history of technology. However, this case, as well as Uhl's other topic choices, allows many fresh insights","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":"140926111","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":"Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal] ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (review)","authors":"M. Luísa Sousa","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926359","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;Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal]&lt;/em&gt; ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; M. Luísa Sousa (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal]&lt;/em&gt; Edited by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019. Pp. 410. &lt;p&gt;This volume brings together contributions from eleven authors in ten chapters, based on research carried out over the last twenty years, and reflects the development and maturity of the field of STM history in Portugal. The editors hope that it will serve as a model for urban histories of STM in other territories. Covering the period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, the authors focus on eighteen scientific institutions to analyze how urban problems inspired the framing of STM problems and how the knowledge they produced shaped the city materially, socially, and symbolically (and vice versa). The book is in Portuguese, but parts of it have been published in English, some in this journal.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In this volume, \"science\" is understood in a broad sense, including technology and medicine (p. 28). More than a simplification, this reflects another methodological and historiographical contribution: it goes beyond the monodisciplinary approaches more common in urban histories of STM by bringing together different disciplines and looking at urban scientific institutions such as laboratories; technical workshops; industrial, bacteriological, and biomedical institutes; astronomical observatories; formal and informal universities; and hospitals. Analyzing the blueprints of these buildings shows how STM practices constructed spaces within and around STM institutions and changed the form (and spread) of the city.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The interest in interweaving the making of Lisbon as a political and scientific capital is present in the way the book is structured: it has three parts, divided chronologically according to the periodization of political regimes in contemporary Portugal. The first part, covering roughly the period from 1837 to 1910, has two chapters (1 and 4) that deal with the influence of Saint-Simonianism in technical education at different levels (from artisan to engineer) in three institutions (the Polytechnic School, the Army School, and the Industrial Institute), as well as the importance of the development of credit systems, capitalism, dreams of social emancipation, and romantic sensibilities, all seen through the lens of the place-based practices of STM. The development of disciplines such as astronomy and geology, and their services and practices, are discussed in chapters 3 and 4, which show ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926128","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":"Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945 by A. Kim Clark (review)","authors":"Jasmine Gideon","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926324","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;Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945&lt;/em&gt; by A. Kim Clark &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Jasmine Gideon (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908–1945&lt;/em&gt; By A. Kim Clark. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 208. &lt;p&gt;In this highly engaging book, Clark explores the creation of a public health service in Ecuador in the early twentieth century. In essence, the book is a historical analysis of the interconnections between several different technologies, most notably the development and spread of medical knowledge as evidenced through the growing control over the spread of infectious disease, alongside the development of the railway, which facilitated the spread of bubonic plague across Ecuador. Clark employs historical and political anthropological approaches in her work and bases her analysis on a rich source of uncatalogued archives of letters and documents from a variety of stakeholders. This allows her to produce a fascinating institutional ethnography of the establishment of the Servicio de Sanidad.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Clark is not the first scholar to consider the complex process of state formation, including in a Latin American context. Among several influences, she highlights political geographer Joe Painter's assertion that the \"everyday or prosaic practices can help our understanding of state formation\" (p. 10). Moreover, Clark underlines the gendered and racialized nature of these everyday practices, which she previously examined in her book &lt;em&gt;Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador&lt;/em&gt; (2012). As Clark notes, few studies have analyzed the question of state formation through a focus on public health, and here she acknowledges Paul Farmer's analysis of Ebola in West Africa in &lt;em&gt;Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds&lt;/em&gt; (2020), one of the first books to differentiate between \"containment\" and \"care\" in disease eradication.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Clark's analysis starts in 1908, when although the laboratory identification of the bubonic plague pathogen had already occurred, many questions around its transmission remained. Unfortunately, as Clark contends, the arrival of plague in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, also coincided with the near completion of the new railway line linking the city with the capital city, Quito, and providing connections between Ecuador's five largest cities. Given the lack of treatment options for plague at the time, containment of the disease was vital, and this became the focus of local health board initiatives in Guayaquil. In effect, the city provided a testing ground for subsequent interventions. Yet, although this was important work potentially bringing health benefits to the population as a whole, there were clearly some very problematic and frequently racialized impacts of these developments. Officials relied on forced labor, often Indigenous peasants","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140942265","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 American Robot: A Cultural History by Dustin A. Abnet (review)","authors":"Ben Russell","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926339","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 American Robot: A Cultural History&lt;/em&gt; by Dustin A. Abnet &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Ben Russell (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;The American Robot: A Cultural History&lt;/em&gt; By Dustin A. Abnet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 376. &lt;p&gt;This wide-ranging and thought-provoking book is about the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of the robot in American history. The robot is presented not as a technical creation but as \"a multifaceted character that people use to deal with some of the most persistent tensions in their society\" (p. 295). Taking the robot as a central interpretative lens, the book identifies \"a persistent ideological determination\" to connect and conflate machines and humans, \"sometimes the self, but more frequently others\" (p. 295). The book argues this ideology has been created by American elites—primarily a small subset of American middle- and upper-class men—who, while \"unwilling &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 712]&lt;/strong&gt; to acknowledge that they themselves might be machines, have been willing to accept that others might or should be\" (p. 7). In consequence, humans have been turned into machines and machines into humans, with all the quandaries pertaining to race, gender, and social status that such a transformation entails.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The author acknowledges the extant literature, sharing with it an approach taking the robot as a mirror for humans to reflect upon themselves with—see, for example, Jessica Riskin's &lt;em&gt;The Restless Clock&lt;/em&gt; (2016). The book quickly defines a dual focus, on America and on presenting a narrative right up to 2019. This stands well alongside works that have been written with a European focus and those that are often necessarily historical case studies—take Adelheid Voskuhl's &lt;em&gt;Androids in the Enlightenment&lt;/em&gt; (2013) for the former, for example, and E. R. Truitt's &lt;em&gt;Medieval Robots&lt;/em&gt; (2015) for the latter. That said, note that European museums have adopted the book's long historical view in robots exhibits as standard (Technisches Museum, Vienna, 2013; Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, 2014; Science Museum, London, 2017; and MUDEC, Milan, 2020)—and that there is a caveat to how the book adopts this approach in the following discussion.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The book is split into three parts. \"God and Demon, 1790–1910\" addresses the rise of automaton figures such as Signor Falconi's Indian (1788) or Zadoc Drederick's Steam Man (1868), within the context of American society's nineteenth-century industrial transformation. The second, \"Masters and Slaves, 1910–1945,\" sees Karel Capek's newly coined word \"robot\" applied in an America being transformed into the world's preeminent power. The third, \"Playfellow and Protector, 1945–2019,\" addresses the robot's rise as a creation of popular culture within an America that had huge prosperity but was grappling with the dilemmas of the Cold War. Each section is prefaced with a short case study introducing the key themes to be dis","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140942378","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 Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal by Laine Nooney (review)","authors":"Zachary Loeb","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920561","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 Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal&lt;/em&gt; by Laine Nooney &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Zachary Loeb (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal&lt;/em&gt; By Laine Nooney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 352. &lt;p&gt;In the version of its history that Silicon Valley likes to tell about itself, computing's rise is credited to a gaggle of iconoclastic former hippies who envisioned a world transformed for the better by the computer. This is a myth that is dismantled by Laine Nooney in &lt;em&gt;The Apple II Age&lt;/em&gt;. Focusing on the titular Apple II, the book rejects the idea that personal computing was \"instantly recognized as a revolutionary technology\" (p. 7), instead treating computing as a site of clashing ideas. While engaging closely with the Apple II's affordances, Nooney argues that the history of personal computing is less about counterculture types wanting to produce \"a social revolution\" and more about \"financial interests\" wanting to secure \"their financial standing\" (p. 17).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Beginning with a brief history of the computer before it became personal, Nooney juxtaposes the spread of large mainframe computers with the growth &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 418]&lt;/strong&gt; of a hobbyist subculture of people who wanted their own computers. Though connected to that hobbyist milieu, Nooney frames the path to the Apple II as an attempt to launch a successful consumer product, albeit one offering \"a synthesis of hobbyist instincts for access and accessibility\" in a package that was \"more approachable to novices than anything else available\" (p. 65). The Apple II's hardware was not enough for its potential to be realized; nonspecialist users needed to be convinced the machine could fit into their lives, and they needed software to convince them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Thus, Nooney focuses on five applications that illustrate \"how the computer became personal\" (p. 70). Primary among these is VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program that elevated the microcomputer from a hobbyist toy to a business machine. Beyond business software like VisiCalc, games like &lt;em&gt;Mystery House&lt;/em&gt; were also top sellers, as they demonstrated the microcomputer's entertainment potential. The challenge was to teach \"potential users … to imagine their lives as available for intervention by a computer\" (p. 195), something that the card and banner maker The Print Shop did admirably. Businesses represented valuable markets for the makers of hardware and software, but so too did schools, where programs like &lt;em&gt;Snooper Troops&lt;/em&gt; could capitalize on interest in and desire for educational software. And all the while, the technical challenges of microcomputers—such as the need for backups—provided the space for controversial utility programs like Locksmith. These five pieces of software are considered alongside additions like the 5.25-inch floppy drive and the dot matrix printer, which further expanded wha","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001897","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":"Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft & the Sciences of the Sea by Samantha Muka (review)","authors":"Jennifer Hubbard","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920555","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;Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft &amp; the Sciences of the Sea&lt;/em&gt; by Samantha Muka &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Jennifer Hubbard (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft &amp; the Sciences of the Sea&lt;/em&gt; By Samantha Muka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. viii + 242. &lt;p&gt;For the uninitiated, large public aquariums might seem like glorified goldfish bowls. Samantha Muka's richly textured &lt;em&gt;Oceans Under Glass&lt;/em&gt; explodes this simplistic view and shows how \"tank crafters\" create complex and intricate systems for a variety of purposes. Specialized aquaria function as simulacra of different aspects of oceans in miniature, which have shaped our perceptions of the undersea world and even scientific understanding. To my surprise, much of the \"undersea\" footage of David Attenborough's award-winning &lt;em&gt;Blue Planet&lt;/em&gt; was aquarium based, although viewers assumed expert cameramen-divers had been filming underwater. While \"no tank system can perfectly replicate the natural environment\" (p. 60), information gained from keeping undersea species alive in such tanks necessarily informs our knowledge of these difficult-to-monitor lifeforms.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Although the title &lt;em&gt;Oceans Under Glass&lt;/em&gt; captures Muka's focus on the centrality of aquaria to marine biology, she also seeks, in this highly original work, to give due credit to an extended community of hobbyists, engineers, and professional or self-trained experts in \"tank craft.\" Through tinkering and successful improvisations to advance tank technology and techniques for keeping marine species alive, these experts are essential to scientific investigations but have preferred in-person and in-situ communication rather than formal publications. Meanwhile, marine scientists usually divorce biological information from its derived context in their publications, seldom mentioning the technicians and hobbyists who have enabled their investigations. Due to the scarcity of sources on the history of tank crafting, Muka was forced to dive into hobbyist manuals, magazines, journals, and global online communities to learn their history. She visited public, private, and for-profit aquariums to interview willing tank crafters and also to view these miniature oceans.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oceans Under Glass&lt;/em&gt; is divided into five main chapters. While each focuses on different aspects of aquarium history, Muka presents the different specializations in their chronological order of emergence, beginning with a general introduction to the tank-craft community. Later chapters focus on photography and film aquariums; aquaria specialized for keeping delicate animals such as jellyfish alive (Kriesel aquariums, in which water is agitated to simulate the natural environment); reef tanks; and breeding tanks. In &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 407]&lt;/strong&gt; each, she highlights the contributions by key individuals and links their advances to external outcomes. Earl","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002407","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}