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Reviews
| Modernity and Technology. Ed. by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. viii+421 pp., notes, tables, refs., index. $40 hb (ISBN 0-262-13421-7).
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The primary theme of Modernity and Technology is the intertwining of technological development with societal changes. According to this volume's various contributors, different cultures reacted in various ways to technological developments. The ways in which those cultures were modified constitutes modernity. Modernity and Technology is a dense, demanding collection of essays, not all of which are either cogent or authoritative. As in all collections of this kind, the volume must be evaluated by balancing the strengths and weaknesses of the writings of its contributors. Using this criterion, this reviewer found Modernity and Technology to be a mixed bag.
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The best essays are tightly organized investigations of the interrelationship between changes in technology and the changes they trigger in society. This review will focus on the two essays that did this best.
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Paul N. Edwards's contribution, "Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organizations in the History of Sociotechnical Systems," defines this relationship as the essence of modernity. "The argument of this essay is that infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped—in other words, co-construct—the condition of modernity. By linking macro, meso, and micro scales of time space and social organization, they form the stable foundation of modern social worlds" (p. 186).
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Edwards focuses on the concept of infrastructure, which he defines as "those systems without which contemporary societies cannot function" (p. 187). He traces the origin of modern infrastructures to the rapid development of national railroad networks during the second half of the 19th century. Edwards writes (p. 206),
railroads—the nineteenth century's largest and most complex infrastructures—deployed innovations in both human organization and information technology to administer and coordinate their far-flung networks. Problems of scheduling, optimizing loads, transferring shipments from one railroad to another, technological standardization and accounting were severe in the rapidly expanding national and even continental networks. Railroads resolved these control problems through both social innovation and complex administrative organizations with multi-layered managerial hierarchies and a high degree of functional specialization and technological change, vertical files, standard reporting and accounting forms, etc. These sociotechnical systems later became models for the administration (control) of other emerging systems, such as the telephone network which adopted and adapted them.
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He makes a convincing argument that it was the development of organized railroad networks that provided the prototypes for such internet predecessors as APEANET and Usenet, which, although originally organized for specialized groups of users, would eventually morph into the current omnipresent World Wide Web.
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Perhaps the most fascinating segment of Edwards's essay deals with the government-sponsored evolution of SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), which he sees as the first use of digital computers for control as opposed to calculation. SAGE was designed to create and direct an effective and comprehensive air defense for the United States against the threat of nuclear-armed Soviet bombers through widespread gathering and integration of both threat assessment and military hardware. Edwards notes that when SAGE was first proposed in 1950 by a scientific team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was beyond the capabilities of the primitive vacuum tube based computers of the period. However, the infusion of more than $500 million of government funds into research facilities at IBM advanced the state of digital computing to allow the Air Force to deploy SAGE across the U.S. in 1958–61.
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Although the advent of Intercontinental Ballistic missiles had made SAGE largely obsolete by 1965, its spin-off effects continue to this day. The SAGE contract and the research that it subsidized were among the primary factors that brought about IBM's dominance of the world computer market in the early 1960s. This dominance made the computer an essential part of the worlds of business and commerce and gave many people a familiarity with this machine that would rapidly lead to our modern computer-driven economy and society.
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One other essay in this volume is particularly illuminating: "Creativity of Technology: An Origin of Modernity?" by Junichi Murata. The basis of this essay is a comparison of the varying ways in which Japan and China reacted to the advent of Western technology. The example Murata uses is the mechanical clock. As he points out, clocks have been a metaphor for the mechanical worldview. When clocks were first introduced to China by Western missionaries, they became popular as display pieces and playthings, but they were not used as instruments for time measurement and timekeeping. This, according to Murata, was because clocks were perceived by Chinese officials as part of a dangerous alien worldview, which demoted China from its perceived centrality in the known world and the spiritual universe.
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In contrast, Japanese culture did not regard the adaptive process as degenerative to their culture and worldview. As Murata states in his essay (pp. 245–46):
In the case of clocks in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the new artifacts (western clocks) underwent a radical translation as Japanese artisans developed an efficient instrumental rationality to fit them into a traditional network. In contrast, the encounter between modern technology and the Japanese in the late nineteenth century produced a radical transformation of the sociotechnical network and as we have seen the conception of technological determinism accompanying this transformation was the result of the interpretive activities of the Japanese people.
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| Modernity and Technology is a dense book that bears several readings before it reveals all of its interpretations to the reader. Because many of its essays are based on social theory and focus on methodological discussions rather than empirical research, the book may not find its way onto the bookshelves of many industrial archaeology enthusiasts. But for those individuals willing to take the time to absorb the contributors' theoretical constructs, the experience will be enlightening. There are a number of weak essays. However, the fine editorship of Misa, Gray, and Feenberg, coupled with strong contributions from scholars such as Edwards and Morata, provides a number of valuable new interpretations of the ever-evolving interrelationship of advancing technology and human society. |
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