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 6-10 de 65
... greater, and growing, complexity. As social units increase in scale and interdependence, most technologies no longer can serve singular, self- sufficientends at the hands of individuals. Exemplifiedby automated of- ficedevices, their ...
... greater sense of identification with place of an earlier generation is eroded by a kaleidoscopic succession of near and remote interactions, their respective influences over peoples' lives no longer conforming with laws predicting a ...
... greater importance as a source of the punctuated, epi- sodic character of technological advance are factors of human vision and motivated leadership. Much of what is known about this we owe to Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), the ...
... greater extent today— technological systems tend to be associated with teleological overtones. A goal toward which these inanimate entities seem to have been directed is often taken for granted. Largely responsible for this must be the ...
... greater detail. For our first million years or so as an identifiable, hominid presence, stone tools shaped and refined for increasingly specialized uses provide the fullest record of our antecedents. Less is known of the uses to which ...
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 |