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 76
... effects of positive feedbacks, and consequently on indeterminate, nonlinear dynamics. Why not, therefore, try to draw what suggestive insights we can from fieldsthat, however different in substance, are less constrained by the ...
... effect of a surrounding, chronically depressed neighborhood that seemed to slide deeper into anonymity as great columns of acrid smoke corroded even its street signs. I decided then and still believe today that we begin and end with ...
... effect on lesser innovations that followed. Cumulatively, however, those lesser, later innovations often added indispensably to the success of the original inventions. It is a common error to regard inventions and innovations CHAPTER 1 4.
... effects. Technological means are, after all, just as crucial for coercion and exploitation as for more benevolent purposes. Still ... effect, the technological base of the social order—has grown, irregularly but cumulatively and without ...
... effect than was apparent at the time of their initial introduction. Given the informality of the process, records of those later improvements tend to be poor, incomplete, self-serving, or altogether lacking. In not a few cases ...
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 |