Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

  • David Nye
MIT Press: 2006. 282 pp. $27.95 0262140934 | ISBN: 0-262-14093-4

Humans and our ancestors have been using technologies since they made the first stone tools 1.3 million years ago, David Nye points out in his book Technology Matters. Yet the term 'technology' has been in widespread use for less than 100 years. A survey of prominent US periodicals published between 1860 and 1870 yields only 149 references to 'technology', compared with 24,957 mentions of 'inventions'. Nye credits the Norwegian sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen with giving 'technology' its more contemporary sense, and concludes that the word only gained common currency after the First World War.

Nye is a historian of technology and his book focuses on the difficult problem of showing how technologies matter. To do that requires some insight not only into the history of technologies, but into their predictability. The historian Thomas Carlyle described economics as the “dismal” science, but it would seem our history of predicting changes in technology is even worse. Nye cites the work of George Wise, a historian associated with General Electric, whose doctoral thesis revealed that of the 1,500 published predictions from scientists, inventors and sociologists he surveyed, only a third were fulfilled. Towards the end of the book Nye claims that historians are more likely than most to get their predictions right. I found little proof of this claim in the book.

When IBM launched its early home personal computers, it had to create a demand for them. Credit: R. MORSE/TIME & LIFE/GETTY

One could use this predictability problem as evidence of the indeterminacy of technologies; that is, they have multiple, but indefinite, effects. And, indirectly, Nye does this. He is clearly against the now outmoded notion of technological determination. One of the positive features of his book is the vast array of examples and mini-histories that are developed. Nye recognizes the tendency of inventors to hype each invention and make grand claims about how it will bring about a utopian future. Yet a more sober historical account shows both that the outcome may be very different to that predicted, and that much effort has to be put into getting the technology accepted. For example, it took a long time to create demand even for the technologies that shaped much of the modern world, such as the telegraph, the telephone and even the personal computer. Samuel Morse, Nye points out, spent five years “lecturing, lobbying, and negotiating” before getting the US Congress to pay for the first telegraph line.

A second theme for Nye is the claim that technologies are “socially constructed”, which he means in a broad sense. He argues that any emergent technology requires many players, not just an inventor with a great idea. There is a field of players involved in negotiations and development, and only some of the resulting technologies are ultimately successful. This plays back into the problem of predictability.

What's missing from Nye's account — and this is a complaint that can be levelled at 'social constructionists' — is a sensitivity to the 'materiality' of technologies. Part of the struggle is not just that of markets, social structure and the like, but also the resistance and accommodation of the material used. For example, consider human powered flight. Most of Leonardo da Vinci's machines would have failed to fly because of their sheer weight and lack of strength. But when the Gossamer Albatross was constructed in 1979 using modern materials, kevlar and mylar, it was moderately successful. One exception for Leonardo, according to a recent account (see Nature 421, 792; 2003), was a glider, but this was modified by subtracting heavy control mechanisms and adding hang-glider strengtheners.

Nye's book addresses many of the issues and debates surrounding our highly textured technological society, and these are reflected in the questions he asks. Does technology control us? Does it lead to cultural uniformity or diversity? To sustainable abundance or to ecological crisis? To more security or escalating danger? The book is rich in examples, is easily readable and is short enough to be recommended for a day's read.