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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... limited, and contingent episodes of apparent technological “momentum”—“sites, sectors, and periods in which a technology-oriented logic governs,”1 no convincing case can be made that technology has ever consistently served as an ...
... limited. But Brooks offers a modern contrast, whereby with computers and communications systems, “n ot only the software, but also the organization that goes with the system, are inseparable from the physical embodiment of the ...
... limited to only a handful of firmsand industries a few decades ago. Now they have become common as the need to maintain a continuing flow of new innovations is more widely recognized.29 No less obvious is another characteristic of ...
... limited significanceuntil concepts were developed and hypotheses formulated that imparted potential meaning to the observations offered by new instruments. The microscope had existed for over 200 years and many generations of curious ...
... limited to purely materialistic factors. Causality really resides only in the whole of an embracing, ongoing, interacting system. As noted earlier, the linearity with which systems seemingly unfold is usually only apparent ...
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 |