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 81
... increasing synergy and mutual interdependency as we approach the modern period. Until quite recently, it has primarily been viewed from the more consciously documented perspective of the sciences. This has meant that the active ...
... increasing scholarly scrutiny. From an opposite direction, price-setting markets can be identifiedin early modern England in which buyers and sellers nevertheless were so deeply embedded in common networks of trust and mutual ...
... increasing difficulties if we allow the fieldof meaning of contemporary technology to be identified primarily with Braudel's slowly moving, deepest substratum. Characteristic of the technologies that now have begun to dominate our lives ...
... increasing distance. At the core of the shift are increasingly massive flows of electronic information that constitute the vital coordinating mechanisms linking the world's institutions and economies. But dependent on these flows is a ...
... increasingly identifiedwith markets. More generally, however, a much wider range of activity is implied—direct ing ... increasing convergence between at least parts of the basic research complex and market-driven economic institutions ...
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 |