I’ve shared this book before, including a condensed 1-page summary, but I also find it helpful to re-read these kinds of notes because my memory is an oddly shaped – and increasingly rigid – sieve.
Here are the excerpts that stood out this time:
- The meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.
- As Smith further pointed out, technology’s connection to science is generally misunderstood: “Nearly everyone believes, falsely, that technology is applied science. It is becoming so, and rapidly, but through most of history science has arisen from problems posed for intellectual solution by the technician’s more intimate experience of the behavior of matter and mechanisms.”
- Much of North Africa, however, let the wheel fall into disuse after the third century A.D., preferring to transport goods by camel. This was a sensible choice. Maintaining roads for wheeled carts and supplying watering sites for horses and oxen was far more expensive […] Other civilizations, notably the Mayans and the Aztecs, knew of the wheel but never developed it for practical purposes.
- The technical experts, he found, performed only slightly better than others. In short, technological predictions, whoever made them and whatever method was employed, proved no more accurate than flipping a coin.
- predictions are so hard to make is that consumers, not scientists, often discover what is “the next big thing.” Most new technologies are market-driven. Viagra was not developed as a sexual stimulant, but the college students who served as guinea pigs discovered what consumers would like about it.
- In short, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and the personal computer, surely four of the most important inventions in the history of communications, were initially understood as curiosities.
- Where once the telephone bill reflected a simple transaction between a customer and the phone company, now the technology of the telephone is the basis for a wide range of commercial relations that includes toll-free calls to businesses, e-mail, faxes, and SMS messages. Telephones enable people not only to speak to one another, but also to send photographs, texts, news, and videos. As with the electrical system, the telephone provided the infrastructure, or even the main platform, for many unanticipated businesses.
- The concept of technological momentum provides a way to understand how large systems exercise a “soft determinism” once they are in place. […] In the United States the automobile now is “less shaped by and more the shaper of its environment.”
- Judith McGaw examined the enormous variety of brassieres and found not only that there is “no convincing evidence that the breasts need support” but also that brassieres never quite fit.
- Rather than adjust to a single pattern, each cultural region creates hybrid forms, which Robertson calls “glocalization.” Even McDonald’s finds that it must give in to this process. In Spain it sells red wine to go with its hamburgers, and in India (where cows are sacred) it does not serve beef. More generally, an endless process of creolization is taking place, producing such novel combinations as Cuban-Chinese cuisine, Norwegian country music, and “Trini” homepages.
- Henry David Thoreau argued that, rather than constantly expand one’s desires, it was better to simplify material life to make time for reading, reflection, and close study of nature. In Walden (1854) he ridiculed the farmer who spent his life acquiring more possessions, arguing that such a man had lost control over his life. More generally, Thoreau questioned the value of slicing life into segments governed by clock time and suggested that the railway rode mankind rather than the reverse.
- It is easier to develop a “technological fix” that accepts “man’s intrinsic shortcomings and circumvents them…. One does not wait around trying to change people’s minds: if people want more water, one gets them more water rather than requiring them to reduce their use of water
- Wolfgang Schivelbusch presciently observed that “the more efficient the technology, the more catastrophic its destruction when it collapses. There is an exact ratio between the level of the technology with which nature is controlled, and the degree of severity of its accidents.”
- During World War I, both sides were shocked to discover that advanced technologies, when shared equally, led not to quick victory but to stalemate.
- Technological improvements have often been presented as antidotes to war. When each new form of communication was introduced, someone argued that it would increase international understanding by breaking down cultural barriers. Such claims were made for the telegraph, the telephone, radio, the motion picture, the television, and for the Internet.” In practice, however, each of these technologies also has become a tool of warfare.
- Leisure hardly existed as a concept for ordinary people in the nineteenth century, when farmers and factory hands worked as many as 14 hours a day. For most people, leisure only emerged as labor unions fought for shorter working hours. Likewise, privacy was not possible for many before the second half of the nineteenth century. Before then, most houses were small, with shared public rooms and shared sleeping rooms. The idea that children could and should have individual bedrooms is at most a few hundred years old.
- It required a generation for the public to find that it wanted the phonograph not primarily to dictate letters or preserve voices for posterity but to play music.