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. |
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... effort. But rewarding engagement with colleagues and programs at the Santa Fe Institute in recent years convinces me that models of thought need not be in any sense bounded by subject matter or discipline. The Institute has taken ...
... efforts were largely confinedto a progressively wider scanning of the literature and a preliminary accumulation of notes and other materials. But from that time forward, having informed the Institution's Board of Regents of my intention ...
... effort to restore the balance, adding to the richness and complexity of technoscientificinteractions in all periods ... efforts that were cut short, orphaning their technological contributions, by the ever-present likelihood of business ...
... efforts involving many collaborators or competitors. Thus, innovations are better understood less as independent events that unleashed new sequences of change in their own right than as periodically emergent outcomes of wider ...
... efforts to keep findings privy. But in any case, that the new technology ultimately goes public means that technology advances through a “cultural” evolutionary process. The capabilities of all are advanced by the creation or discovery ...
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 |