Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western TechnologyPrinceton University Press, 2012 M09 17 - 360 páginas Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 71
... demands but would create and satisfy previously unrecognized ones. New technologies converge with modernity in embodying a primary direction—toward indefinitelyexpanding the realm of individual powers of expression, understanding ...
... demands contributed substantially to the process of innovation by envisioning needed features and stimulating the search for them.2 Hence it is a reifying distortion to isolate inventions and innovations as triggering events that, at ...
... demands a distinctive approach of its own. Science, for all of its intense specialization, in principle constitutes a corpus of comprehensive, generalized knowledge with recognized frontiers and strategies for its advancement. Its ...
... demand have consistently been more determinative of the directions taken by technological trends than properties or developments inherent in technology itself. Sensitive, diachronic analysis is clearly necessary to isolate factors—some ...
... demands vigilance.” To enter into the virtually boundless territory that Braudel designated as technological seems to require that we take into account not only the designers, makers, and users of technological products but all those ...
Contenido
3 | |
36 | |
3 Technology and the New European Society | 69 |
4 England as the Workshop of the World | 104 |
The American System Emerges | 138 |
6 The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership | 173 |
7 The Competitive Global System | 212 |
Technological Change in a Borderless World | 253 |
Notes | 279 |
References Cited | 301 |
Index | 327 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams Vista previa limitada - 2012 |
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology Robert McCormick Adams Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |