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 31
... tended to be strongly clustered in space and time? What distinguished the handful of technological “breakthroughs” from the almost endless supply of other, more modest or unsuccessful innovations? Are the principal sources of novelty to ...
... tended to have an accelerating, focusing 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 ...
... tended to be more far-reaching in their cumulative 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 ...
... tended to focus on continuities in how or what things are done or made.12 The object is, almost by definition, in the foreground—too ls or devices, the ends they serve, and the parsimony of design and use to which uncounted repetitions ...
... tended to be focused on narrow sectors of industrial activity, he readily accepted, even welcomed, the disruptiveness of their impacts. Describing them as “more like a series of explosions than a gentle, though incessant, transformation ...
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 |