Reframing Technology

An Intellectual History of Thinking Beyond the Machine

Kent Hufford

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9783111396705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: When History Changes Technology
• Chapter 1 Honeycombing the Past Finding Meaning in a Rapidly Industrializing World
• Chapter 2 A Bad State of the Arts Historical Accounts of Technology in Thorstein Veblen’s Wake
• Chapter 3 Disequilibrium, Unwilling Robots, and Decreation Stuart Chase’s Economic – Functional – Political Relations to Technology
• Chapter 4 Converting Technology into Human Culture Lewis Mumford’s Social – Aesthetic – Moral Relations to the Past
• Chapter 5 In-Formation Technology: An Ungrounding Experience Marshall McLuhan’s Aesthetic – Epistemic – Material Relations to the Past
• Chapter 6 Creating a New Technological Narrative
• Epilogue: Impoverished Intelligence and Curbing Our Technological Enthusiasm
• Index