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 84
... example, and word of mouth, or on hands-on acquaintanceship with novel, imported artifacts. Nor is this the end of the limitations to be overcome. Exogenous changes in social receptivity or economic demand have consistently been more ...
... example, the grossly disproportionate roles accorded to the two sexes in the overwhelming majority of technological records currently tends to be passed over in silence by most contemporary works on the history of technology ...
... examples of both kinds surely have led to improvements in even the most habitual practices.26 But in this view, little is left of earlier technological change but dissociated processes and devices, each undergoing marginal changes and ...
... examples, nylon emerged from a search for new polymers to strengthen existing product lines. It only became DuPont's ... example of this, and the U.S. era is clearly another. Beyond mere simultaneity, new technologies that cluster in ...
... example of convergence is provided by petroleum technology, the internal combustion engine, plastics, and polymers. In our own time, microelectronics extends its massively creative, supportive influences to many other centers of ...
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 |