------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (June 2006)
David E. Nye, _Technology Matters: Questions to Live With_.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. xiv + 282 pp. $28 (cloth), ISBN:
0-262-14093-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Rick Szostak, Department of Economics,
University of Alberta.
In this book, David Nye (Professor of Comparative American Studies
and History at Warwick University) devotes a chapter each to ten
important questions regarding the causes and effects of technological
innovation. Most of these questions -- including the effects of
innovation on the environment, employment, and culture -- are
subjects of contentious public discourse. The book seems aimed at
clarifying these issues for a general audience, though Nye notes that
scholars are often guilty of misunderstanding the course of
technological change.
The first chapters are the most satisfying. While Nye could have been
a bit more precise in answering "what is technology?," the first
chapter does a good job of describing the phenomenon of technological
innovation as well as some of the other phenomena to which it is
closely linked. The second chapter provides a very good critique of
both technological determinism and the idea that the course of
technological innovation is inevitable, and the third discusses the
severe limitations of technological predictions.
The fourth chapter asks how historians understand technology. Nye may
underestimate the size of the minority that fails to follow the set
of good practices he suggests. Historians should eschew determinism
and predictability. Nye suggests that historians of technology give
roughly equal weight to technology, politics, the economy, and
society (by which he largely means 'culture') in their analyses. He
applauds the complementarity between 'internalist' (focused on
technical developments) and 'contextual' history, but does not note
that the field of history of technology has swung sharply between
these two orientations in the postwar period. He applauds historians
for increasingly focusing on incremental innovations and the long
process of development, and thus downplaying the role of the 'heroic
inventor.'
At times in the early chapters Nye is too strident in his
anti-determinism. In chapter 4, he finally appreciates, following
Thomas Hughes, that technological systems once in place constrain
further technological and social choices. Only in later chapters does
he recognize in passing that even individual innovations provide both
constraints and incentives: they do not determine but certainly exert
causal influence on a range of individual and societal decisions.
While Nye strives in the first four chapters to provide answers to
his questions, the latter chapters tend to provide conflicting
arguments regarding the effect of technology on various other
phenomena. Though the information provided is useful and accurate,
many readers may wish that Nye had more clearly attempted to weigh
the relative importance of these arguments. Nye relies throughout the
book on powerful examples rather than a careful attempt to delineate
the typicality of these, and thus the reader has little guidance in
choosing which examples to place greatest confidence in. The lack of
subtitles in any of the chapters exacerbates the difficulty of
comparing one line of argument to another.
Yet I do not wish to be harsh. Nye's goal, it seems, is to debunk
some strongly held but simplistic views of technology. As noted
above, the earlier chapters strive to convince readers that
technology is not some inevitable force inexorably shaping our lives
(whether to good or evil effect) but rather that human actors shape
innovation in a host of ways. Later chapters then provide
counter-examples against simplistic beliefs that technology
_necessarily_ destroys local cultures, ruins the environment, causes
unemployment, and reduces human security. Nye notes that some
technologies such as the personal computer work against cultural
conformity, while consumers shape the effects of other technologies
such as mass production in ways that preserve autonomy. (Again a more
careful statement of how technology may limit but not determine
choices would have been helpful.) Likewise, technological innovation
can at times aid the environment (though most of the chapter on the
environment addresses the question of whether humans should lessen
their wants rather than expand their production). Nye details how the
idea of technological unemployment has been around for centuries but
unemployment rates have not risen secularly (he skips over the
question of whether medium-term technological unemployment was
observed during the Great Depression and 1970s). And Nye notes that
technology has freed many humans from the insecurities associated
with hunger and disease while creating new sources of insecurity.
A book that covers such a wide scope lends itself to inevitable
quibbles. The unwary reader may be needlessly confused in the first
chapter between the essence of technology and the causal
relationships of which it is part. Nye's discussion of predictability
clearly distinguishes between major and incremental innovations, but
leaves the impression that the latter are virtually as unpredictable
as the former. Nye's discussion of culture largely misses the key
question of how strong the link is between the available range of
consumer goods and the beliefs and attitudes that lie at the heart of
culture: those who decry cultural homogenization are often guilty of
implying that what one wears and eats defines who one is. The chapter
on the environment skips the entire debate between optimists and
pessimists. The chapter on employment discusses (uncritically) how
work effort has increased in some ways in recent years, but largely
ignores the amazing decline in the length of the workweek in previous
centuries. And the chapter on whether technology should be regulated
fails to suggest any criteria for distinguishing cases such as new
pharmaceuticals where some sort of oversight may be a good idea from
other technologies where markets can best adjudicate.
This is a handy book to recommend to students (or colleagues) who
need an antidote to the more simplistic versions of technological
determinism, environmentalism, or cultural decline that circulate on
university campuses. The range of detailed historical examples
utilized by Nye is quite impressive. Many students will be encouraged
by the book to a more nuanced perspective, and guided to further
reading. Others, unfortunately, may find it hard to integrate the
information provided into a coherent understanding of the issues at
stake.
Rick Szostak is Professor of Economics at the University of Alberta,
and will be visiting the Department of History and Civilization at
the European University Institute in Florence during 2006-7. He
intends to write a book, _Exogenous Growth: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives_. Recent publications include _Technology and American
Society: A History_ (with Gary Cross, second edition, 2004),
_Classifying Science: Phenomena, Data, Theory, Method, Practice_
(2004); "Evaluating the Historiography of the Great Depression:
Explanation or Single-Theory Driven?" (_Journal of Economic
Methodology_, 2005); "Allocating Scarce Shoreline: Institutional
Change in the Newfoundland Inshore Fishery" (with Ken Norrie,
_Newfoundland and Labrador Studies_, 2005) and "Economic History as
It Is and Should Be" (_Journal of Socio-Economics_, 2006). He has
recently completed a book manuscript, _Restoring Human Progress:
Transcending the Postmodern Condition_.
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Published by EH.Net (June 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
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