Technologies as Anchors for Societal Confl icts. An Outline of the Concept

Abstract

This article sketches out the approach of ‘Technologies as Anchors for Societal Conflicts’. TASC is conceived as a heuristic tool to help systematically bring into focus societal conflicts and debates that became anchored to technologies without being directly connected to them. This paper’s main hypothesis is that these anchors were developed, deliberately or unintentionally, to make complex issues seem more tangible and easier to resolve. Technological anchors, therefore, could function as a catalyst for a dispute or even turn into a connecting hub between various societal conflicts and debates. TASC is intended to help identify technologies utilised in this way as an object of research that is of interest for a cultural history of technology. To sketch out the utility of TASC and place it within the existing spectrum of methods and concepts applied by historians of technology, debates anchored to the bicycle, electricity generation, the machines of the early Industrial Revolution and nuclear power plants are discussed as examples.