John Zerzan, Alice Carnes (eds.): Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant? (1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial intelligence, communication technology, computing, critique, history of technology, marxism, silicon valley, technology
“The rich array of commentators in this anthology looks at the way technology is waven into the fabric of our lives, and asks: is this what we really want? Questioning Technology is sharp, eloquent, and provocative.
Some of the writers fully intend to shake us up. Russell Means’ essay “Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth” is an inspired case in point. Some suggest solutions: Carolyn Merchant’s “Death of Nature” advocates a restructuring of our priorities in favor of decentralization, “soft” and labor-intensive technologies, and simpler lifestyles. All the contributors face the consequences of our technology-dependency unflichingly and often wittily.
Questioning Technology is an impassioned plea for us to think before we act – and to know that we can, if we want to, ‘unplug ourselves.'”
Publisher New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, Santa Cruz, CA, and Gabriola Island, BC, 1991
ISBN 0865712042, 9780865712041
222 pages
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-8-4)
Comment (0)Sungook Hong: Wireless: From Marconi’s Black-Box to the Audion (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · communication technology, history of communications, history of technology, radio, technology, telegraphy, wireless networks
By 1897 Guglielmo Marconi had transformed James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic waves into a workable wireless telegraphy system, and by 1907 Lee de Forest had invented the audion, a feedback amplifier and oscillator that opened the way to practical radio transmission. Fifteen years after Marconi’s invention, wireless had become an essential means of communication, as well as a hobby for many.
This book offers a new perspective on the early days of wireless communication. Drawing on previously untapped archival evidence and recent work in the history and sociology of science and technology, it examines the substance and context of both experimental and theoretical aspects of engineering and scientific practices in the first years of this technology. It offers new insights into the relationship between Marconi and his scientific advisor, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming (inventor of the vacuum tube). It includes the full story of the infamous 1903 incident in which Marconi’s opponent Nevil Maskelyne interfered with Fleming’s public demonstration of Marconi’s syntonic (tuning) system at the Royal Institution by sending derogatory messages from his own transmitter. The analysis of the Maskelyne affair highlights the struggle between Marconi and his opponents, the efficacy of early syntonic devices, Fleming’s role as a public witness to Marconi’s private experiments, and the nature of Marconi’s “shows.” It also provides a rare case study of how the credibility of an engineer can be created, consumed, and suddenly destroyed. The book concludes with a discussion of de Forest’s audion and the shift from wireless telegraphy to radio.
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology series
ISBN 0262082985, 9780262082983
248 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-3-30)
Comment (1)Jack Linchuan Qiu: Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · china, communication technology, digital divide, network society
“The idea of the “digital divide,” the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of “network labor” crucial to China’s economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, writes Qiu, are the information “have-less”: migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafés, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond.
Qiu brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, Qiu examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, writes Qiu, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South.”
Foreword by Manuel Castells
Afterword by Carolyn Cartier
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 026217006X, 9780262170062
320 pages
PDF (added on 2013-6-21)
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