Carroll W. Pursell: The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (2007)

From the medieval farm implements used by the first colonists to the invisible links of the Internet, the history of technology in America is a history of society as well. Arguing that “the tools and processes we use are a part of our lives, not simply instruments of our purpose,” historian Carroll Pursell analyzes technology’s impact on the lives of women and men, on their work, politics, and social relationships — and how, in turn, people influence technological development.

Pursell shows how both the idea of progress and the mechanical means to harness the forces of nature developed and changed as they were brought from the Old World to the New. He describes the ways in which American industrial and agricultural technology began to take on a distinctive shape as it adapted and extended the technical base of the industrial revolution. He discusses the innovation of an American system of manufactures and the mechanization of agriculture; new systems of mining, lumbering, and farming, which helped conquer and define the West; and the technologies that shaped the rise of cities.

In the second edition of The Machine in America, Pursell brings this classic history up to date with a revised chapter on war technology and new discussions on information technology, globalization, and the environment.

Publisher JHU Press, 2007
ISBN 0801885795, 9780801885792
Length 398 pages

Keywords and phrases
industrial revolution, Oliver Evans, Native Americans, gristmill, World War II, steam engines, Arpanet, postmodern, scientific management, Benjamin Butterworth, California, blast furnaces, traction engine, England, Scientific American, wrought iron, Herbert Hoover, sash saw, cold war, technology and hegemony

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Tara Brabazon: The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age (2007)

Looking at schools and universities, it is difficult to pinpoint when education, teaching and learning started to haemorrhage purpose, aspiration and function. Libraries and librarians have been starved of funding. Teachers cram their curriculum with ‘skill development’ and ‘generic competencies’ because knowledge, creativity and originality are too expensive to provide to unmotivated students and parents obsessed with league tables, not learning.

Meanwhile, the internet offers a glut of information on everything-under-the-sun, a mere mouse-click away. Bored surfers fill their cursors and minds with irrelevancies. We lose the capacity to sift, discard and judge. Information is no longer for social good, but for sale.

Tara Brabazon argues that this information fetish has been profoundly damaging to our learning institutions and to the ambitions of our students and educators. In The University of Google she projects a defiant and passionate vision of education as a pathway to renewal, where research is based on searching and students are on a journey through knowledge, rather than consumers in the shopping centre of cheap ideas.

Angry, humorous and practical in equal measure, The University of Google is based on real teaching experience and on years of engaged and sometimes exasperated reflection on it. It is far from a luddite critique of the information age. Tara Brabazon celebrates the possibilities of digital platforms in education, but deplores the consequences of placing funding on technology and not teachers. In doing so, she opens a new debate on how to make our educational system both productive and provocative in the (post-) information age.

Contents: Introduction; Living (in the) Post. Section 1 Literacy: BA (Google): graduating to information literacy; Digital Eloi and analogue Morlocks. Section 2 Culture: Stretching flexible learning; An i-diot’s guide to i-lectures; Popular culture and the sensuality of education. Section 3 Critique: Exploiting knowledge?; Deglobalizing education; Burning towers and smoldering truth: September 11 and the changes to critical literacy. Conclusion: The gift: why education matters; Select bibliography; Index.

Publisher Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007
ISBN 075467097X, 9780754670971
Length 234 pages

Keywords and phrases
critical literacy, iPod, Murdoch University, knowledge economy, World Wide Web, student-centred learning, Morlocks, neo-liberalism, Western Australia, September 11, multimedia literacies, yoga, Google, Postmodern, asanas, Fordist, creative industries, Citizendium, post-Fordism, i-lecture

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Brian Winston: Media Technology and Society. A History From the Printing Press to the Superhighway (1998)

How are media born? How do they change? And how do they change us?

Media Technology and Society offers a comprehensive account of the history of communications technologies, from the printing press to the internet. Brian Winston argues that the development of new media, from the telegraph and the telephone to computers, satellite and virtual reality, is the product of a constant play-off between social necessity and suppression: the unwritten law by which new technologies are introduced into society only insofar as their disruptive potential is limited. Winston’s fascinating account examines the role played by individuals such as Alexander Graham Bell, Gugliemo Marconi, John Logie Baird, Boris Rozing and Charles Babbage, and challenges the popular myth of the present-day “information revolution.”

Publisher Routledge, 1998
ISBN 041514230X, 9780415142304
374 pages

Keywords and phrases
ENIAC, AT&T, Bell Labs, EDVAC, cathode ray tube, Intelsat, Bletchley Park, integrated circuit, UNIVAC, selenium, microprocessor, point-contact transistor, iconoscope, ARPANET, NTSC, solid state electronics, However, differential analyser, holography, Entscheidungsproblem

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