Reframing Technology

An Intellectual History of Thinking Beyond the Machine
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-11-139611-8
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, 202 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 435 g

For over a hundred years, technological change has been framed using a simple narrative: technology drives history. Reframing Technology challenges this idea of technological determinism through metahistorical and literary analyses that locate the birth of contingent frameworks in the historiography of technology in and around the 1930s. The book also traces how the formal discipline of the History of Technology was remarkably preconfigured by four North American authors who were not professional historians, Thorstein Veblen, Stuart Chase, Lewis Mumford, and Marshall McLuhan. They are considered as a continuum and are put in dialogue despite their training in different disciplines. Their work is then linked up with the emergence of formal and institutional inquiry into narratives of technology at the end of the twentieth century. The ideas in the book are applied to current discussions about the future of technology and artificial intelligence. The book’s main argument is that, as the authors listed above suggest, we need to think beyond "the machine," and reframe technology as a cultural practice, rather than thinking of it as an object or a tool.

Zielgruppe

Scholars and advanced students of technology, history, media, cul

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hufford, Kent

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Kent Hufford, LMU München, Deutschland.

Kent Hufford, University of Munich (LMU), Munich, Germany.