Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture
Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (science * culture) Thomas P. Hughes,
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226359344
DDC: 303
Edition: Paperback; 2005-05-13
Summary:
To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer
goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in
terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens.
In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to
technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by
chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential
Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character
but who also explored its creative potential.Hughes draws on an
enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what
technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we
might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not
against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development
of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s
to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad
ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural
fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has
offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that
technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic
environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the
increasing mechanization of American life.Such divergent views,
Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the
fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of
contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign
deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World,
he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions,
follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology,
rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an
embodiment of human values.
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