This book examines the broad range of social and intellectualresponses to technology in the first four decades of this century, andsuggests that these responses set the terms that continue to governcontemporary debates.
Starting around 1900, technology became a lively subject for debate among intellectuals, writers, and other opinion leaders. The expansion of the machine into ever more areas of social and economic life had led to a need to interpret its meanings in a more comprehensive way than in the past. World War I and its aftermath shifted the terms of this ongoing debate by underlining both the potential dangers of technology and its centrality to modern life. This book examines the broad range of social and intellectual responses to technology in the first four decades of this century, and suggests that these responses set the terms that continue to govern contemporary debates. Focusing on the broader contexts within which intellectual positions are formed, the book highlights the ways in which attitudes toward technology were shaped in a wide variety of national and organizational settings. A common theme is that, in debating technology, people drew on their distinctive national symbols and cultural traditions. By emphasizing the interplay between debates on technology and the making of modernity, the book challenges standard historical accounts of the early twentieth century.
Contributors Ketil G. Andersen, Aant Elzinga, Tor Halvorsen, Mikael H rd, Kjetil Jakobsen, Andrew Jamison, Catharina Landstr m, Conny Mithander, Sissel Myklebust, Dick van Lente, Peter Wagner
Conceptual framework - technology debates as appropriation processes, Mikhael Hard and Andrew Jamison; theoretical perspectives - culture as a resource for technological change, Aant Elzinga; German regulation - the integration of modern technology into national culture, Mikhael Hard; American anxieties - technology and the reshaping of republican values, Andrew Jamison; engineering cultures - European appropriations of Americanism, Kjetil Jakobsen et al; Swedish grandeur - contending reformulations of the great-power project, Aant Elzinga et al; national strategies - the gendered appropriation of household technology, Catherina Landstrom; Dutch conflicts - the intellectual and practical appopriation of a foreign technology, Dich van Lente; sociological reflections - the technology question during the first crisis of modernity, Peter Wagner.
Mikael H rd is Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology. His books include The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology- Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (coedited with Andrew Jamison; MIT Press, 1998).
