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 47
... turning points and irregularities in rate across an extended period of time, there is some hope of learning how to distinguish less arbitrarily between breaks and continuities in processes of technological change. The subject of this ...
... turns out on closer inspection to be marred by ambiguities, at least in principle the substance and timing of each of ... turn indirectly lends weight to a belief in the autonomy of the technological sphere as a whole. Yet almost all of ...
... turns attention in many new directions—among them, toward a micro view of industrial settings, where much of the real process of technological change unfolds in long, complex, usually almost undetected sequences of interaction ...
... turn explains history.”10 For the great French historian, the subject escaped from any ordinary set of disciplinary constraints and hence could benefitfrom the constructive tension between contextualizing approaches and more specialized ...
... turn begat further niches for new operating system software and programming languages, and beyond that for desktop publishing, computer-aided design, electronic mail, and so on. All of the latter innovations fell quickly into place once ...
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 |