Twentieth-century Technology Research Articles

Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education by Katie Day Good

Reviewed by: Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education by Katie Day Good Timothy Kelly Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education. By Katie Day Good. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. xii + 279 pp. The COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted and amplified the role that technology plays in today's K–12 education and opened widespread debate about its efficacy, equity, and appropriateness. Katie Day Good suggests that we might reasonably be concerned with other questions as well, such as toward what ideological purpose these technologies might be aimed. She does so by exploring another push for greater integration of technology in the classroom that occurred a century earlier. Good sees this early to mid-twentieth-century movement to expand the use of technology in schools as coming from two sources. The first was a pedagogical reform initiative that urged teachers to expand beyond rote and textbook-based learning in favor of a rich immersion in imagery and sound that would allow students to use more of their senses to learn. The second was a growing conviction that Americans should become citizens of the world rather than see themselves as set apart from it. Good suggests that these two movements [End Page 327] converged "amidst rising social concerns about intercultural contact, mass media, and global war" (3). Advocates for implementing these technologies stressed their abilities to open the world to students, to allow them to see the foreign and exotic from the safety of the classroom, and to generate support for efforts by the United States to reshape that world to be more hospitable to American values. Good argues that "these media were more than mere AV aids; they were powerful 'devices' for efficiently preparing children to understand and uphold the dominant social values of native-born European Americans within an increasingly diverse United States, and ensure a dominant role for the nation in a changing international order" (27). The new technologies encompassed a wide range of media and included such innovations in sensory stimulation as stereoscopes, lantern slides, movies, and radio. Each of these allowed teachers to bring the world to their classrooms, to provide rich information about other places, cultures, and societies for students who might never leave their home counties. Educators and the for-profit producers of most of these technologies promoted them as sensorily powerful and safe ways to expose students to knowledge that they would otherwise have to travel to learn. The technologies would make students more cosmopolitan in their outlooks at a time when the United States had begun to expand its role in shaping the world. This greater international responsibility required that Americans shed their parochial outlooks. It also depended on students maintaining a high degree of surety that the world ought to conform to American ideals and interests. It demanded a sophisticated world view and a deeply felt patriotism. Even as progressive educators championed new technologies for their abilities to offer students a wider sensory experience, teachers often saw the virtues of some less cutting-edge "technologies." They favored maps for instance, bulletin boards, and pageants that celebrated America's embrace of ethnic diversity. Teachers could master these readily and they stimulated student learning. Schools could afford them. Good offers rich evidence revealing the goals that technology developers and promoters advanced for their products, as well as of the discourse that took place in educators' professional associations. We learn much about what interested adults intended these technologies to accomplish—or worried that they might do. Less clear is how students actually experienced the technologies. The sources for this are far more elusive and so we do not get a clear sense of whether students imbibed the lessons as the curriculum designers intended. In the midst of this early twentieth-century technology push, the world suffered a pandemic that killed far more people worldwide than COVID-19 [End Page 328] will likely claim. Given the powerful role that we saw the COVID-19 pandemic play in shaping technology advancements in K–12 education in recent years, it might be useful to consider the impact that the 1918 influenza outbreak played in this...

Editorial

‘Reality television’ is the product of twentieth-century technology culture that incorporates a wide range of media activities including talent shows, documentary series and celebrity shows. One of the frequently discussed issues in the current scholarship is the representation of multiculturalism in western ‘reality shows’, particularly of South Asian families and their lives. The current issue remains as a genuine attempt to capture, analyse and theorize a number of highly important categories of ‘reality television’ in South Asian scholarship.

The Italian Empire and the Great War by Vanda Wilcox

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 1, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com VANDA WILCOX, THE ITALIAN EMPIRE AND THE GREAT WAR. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. In October 1911 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire and mounted a massive seaborne invasion of Turkish Tripolitania and Cyrenaica across the central Mediterranean. If at that time Italy was generally seen as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, so its prime foreign policy objective seemed to be the achievement of Great Power status by taking on no less an opponent than Turkey and seizing its last remaining North African possessions. But what was expected to be a swift and simple campaign, a mere ‘military parade’, turned into a vicious and prolonged war of colonial conquest. And, as Vanda Wilcox argues in her new study of the Italian empire, the story of Italy and the First World War actually begins with the war against Ottoman Turkey in 1911, after which Italy was to experience more than a decade of conflict, ending only in 1923-4 (or up to 1932 in the case of Libya). During the Libyan war the Italians for the first time used many of the latest tools of twentieth century technology – barbed wire and machine guns, motor transport, aircraft (both airships and aeroplanes, tried and tested for reconnaissance, target-spotting, strafing and bombing) and (thanks to Guglielmo Marconi) wireless. Yet Wilcox asserts that among the obvious defects of this imperial venture into Libya were an essentially inept military machine and precarious state finances, both with serious implications for Italy’s forthcoming performance in the First World War. Intriguingly, she argues that the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-12, and the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 are integral to an understanding of how the First World War began, and also many aspects of how it was fought. She suggests that ‘it was the succession of defeats suffered by the Ottomans in North Africa and the Balkans which began the process of destabilising the precarious European balance of power’. (p.13) (Here there seems to be an echo of events that led up to the Second World War, notably the international crisis provoked by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.) Wilcox also suggests that for Italy the most important legacy of the Italo-Turkish war was the experience of ‘unprecedented’ cross-party mobilisation. ‘This both demonstrated the new power of the media and mass culture to shape public opinion and indicated that the process of ‘creating Italians’ was well under way. Fatally, however, the 114 CURATED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI experience taught that the shared causes around which Italians could coalesce were expansionism and war.’ (p.39) Here the implications for the rise of Fascism are clear. Then, because this is a contemporary book, much space has to be devoted to issues of race and Italian ‘whiteness’ in the context of the Libyan experience. Yet given Italy’s own history of repeated invasions, partitions and foreign subjection and rule, Italians tend to be defined less by physical, racial characteristics than by culture (in the broadest sense), language and religion. And in any case the similarity in appearance of many northern Libyans and southern Italians often leaves little room for active ‘racial’ discrimination, at least on grounds of physical appearance. This book offers an arresting and important thesis, which indeed suggests that this is a subject that deserves further and wider study. The Libyan side of the story is perhaps presented with less assurance than the other issues (for instance, the common religion of Turks, Berbers and Arabs, and the allimportant role of the Sanusi religious confraternity might usefully have been given more weight). Also reliance on contemporary Italian ‘historians’ such as Angelo del Boca and his following tends to distort and even falsify much of the the Italian colonial record in Libya in particular and in Africa in general. For the writers of this school can find little good at all, no merit...

Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works

Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works

Who Benefited from Industrialization? The Local Effects of Hydropower Technology Adoption in Norway

This paper studies the impact of the construction of hydropower facilities on labor market outcomes in Norway at the turn of the twentieth century (1891–1920). The sudden breakthrough in hydropower technology provides a quasi-experimental setting, as not all municipalities had suitable natural endowments and the possible production sites were often located in remote areas. We find that hydropower municipalities experienced faster structural transformation and displayed higher occupational mobility. We interpret this as evidence that this early twentieth-century technology was skill biased, as workers in the new skilled jobs were recruited from a broad segment of the population.

The role of production factor quality and technology diffusion in twentieth-century productivity growth

The twentieth century was a period of exceptional growth, driven mainly by the increase in total factor productivity (TFP). Using a database of 17 OECD countries over the 1890–2013 period, this paper integrates production factor quality into the measure of TFP, namely by factoring the level of education of the working-age population into the measure of labor and the age of equipment in the measure of capital stock. We then estimate how the diffusion of technology impacts the growth of this newly measured TFP through two emblematic general purpose technologies, electricity and information and communication technologies (ICT). Using growth decomposition methodology from instrumental variable estimates, this paper finds that education levels contribute most significantly to growth, while the age of capital makes a limited, although significant, contribution. Quality-adjusted production factors explain less than half of labor productivity growth in the largest countries except for Japan, where capital deepening posted a very large contribution. As a consequence, the “one big wave” of productivity growth (Gordon in Am Econ Rev 89(2):123–128, 1999), as well as the ICT productivity wave for the countries which experienced it, remains only partially explained by quality-adjusted factors, although education and technology diffusion contribute to explain the earlier wave in the USA in the 1930s–1940s. Finally, technology diffusion, as captured through our two general purpose technologies, leaves unexplained between 0.6 and 1 percentage point of yearly growth, as well as a large proportion of the two twentieth-century technology waves. These results both support a significant lag in the diffusion of general purpose technologies and raise further questions on a wider view on growth factors, including changes in the production process, management techniques and financing practices. Measurement problems may also contribute to the unexplained share of growth.

William Faulkner in the media ecology

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize-winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner as not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that has engaged readers and critics for over sixty years. Essays by John T. Matthews, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Stefan Solomon, and Donald M. Kartiganer assess how Faulkner's legacy has been shaped through media adaptation and public commemoration of his work. Jay Watson, Michael Zeitlin, Sarah Gleeson-White, Robert Jackson, and Sascha Morrell consider a range of media relevant to the creation of the writer's stories and ways to recalibrate traditional thinking about his writing. Mark Steven, Peter Lurie, and Richard Godden examine how the vastly different mediations of both cinema and money influenced Faulkner's work. Editors Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon have brought together some of the most prominent voices in Faulkner studies, along with a number of emerging scholars, to construct a portrait of Faulkner as a thoroughly modern writer, as much attuned to the evolution of the contemporary world as he was to the past.

DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World. DavidKinkela. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World. David Kinkela. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. In 1972, the American Environmental Protection Agency banned most domestic uses of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and over the following two decades worldwide usage of the chemical declined as well. DDT's fall has proven almost as controversial as the environmental and health effects of the pesticide while it remained in widespread use. Some environmentalists lamented the continued use of DDT in developing tropical countries following the ban, while critics of the chemical backlash accompanying the greening of America blamed knee-jerk environmentalism for creating new holocaust of malaria among the world's poorest populations. David Kinkela's study of the rise, fall, and aftermath of DDT cuts through the rhetoric surrounding the pesticide, examining the cultural and social, as well as the health and environmental issues entangled with DDT's history. Kinkela's account follows DDT from its military applications during the Second World War, to its role in American overseas development programs, through the nation's eventual rejection of the chemical. Part of the book's story is the familiar account of an almost religious belief on the part of Americans in the power and omnipotence of twentieth-century technology. DDT became tool of agricultural and health policy, both in the United States and abroad, and those who used it often viewed the chemical as one-size-fits-all weapon in the war on insects and disease: Variations in climate and geography, as well as the social, economic, and political disparities among nations were thought to be irrelevant in the contest against insects pests (92). Kinkela notes that the American ban did nothing to prohibit the use of DDT in foreign public health campaigns. He also adroitly explains the ways in which the chemical and its systems of application were becoming less effective during the 1960s and early 1970s due to environmental particularities - from the inherent challenges of the mosquito eradication ideal to growing insect resistance - and thereby illustrates the ways in which debates over the benefits and harms of banning DDT often ignored the reality of its changing effectiveness in favor of partisan politics and institutional agendas. Whereas Kinkela admits his study is a narrative that explores global history from an American perspective, it is the detailed exploration of DDT's links to American foreign policy and aid that provide significant contribution to the history of technology and environmentalism (9). …

Ellul’s alternative theory of technology: Anticipating the fourth milieu of virtuality

Jacques Ellul was a self-proclaimed ‘watchman’ over the progression of twentieth-century technology, and he argues that humans have adopted a sociological determinism that he dubbed ‘technique’, an idea explored in his widely read book The Technological Society (1964). Technique, for Ellul, explains both large-scale and small-scale trends in human civilizations by considering rationalized efficiency as the primary instigator of twentieth-century change. This article argues that Ellul’s conception of technique as a determining factor in technological change has been subsumed by a trend not for rationalized efficiency but rather for evolved efficiency. Specifically, I look at the underlying hypothesis that informed Ellul’s thought – his theory of the three milieus – to offer an interpretative framework for understanding how several current civilizations have moved into a fourth milieu of virtuality. Positing a fourth milieu could potentially revitalize Ellulian scholarship in studies of technology, media ecology and sustainability.

Examining the Place of Music in Western Eco-cosmology, with Implications for Electroacoustic Musical Practice

This article addresses the place of music in the Western worldview, arguing for a greater appreciation of music in a modern eco-cosmology which embraces environmental priorities as central to human prosperity, while contextualising defensible connections between music, sound and environment potentially useful for electroacoustic musical practice. Precise analytical terminology is established, and the methodology of environmental history is used to assess Western understandings about the role and place of music. Origins and ideas regarding immersive space, emotive power and the development of dualistic ‘nature–culture’ schemas are explored. Impacts of key developments in twentieth-century technology and environmental thought are examined as they relate to electroacoustic research. Biomusicology is reviewed for insights into innate musical structures and possibilities, and a recent linguistic study is analysed from a musical perspective to advance a cross-disciplinary argument: music may represent a form of mitigational behaviour used to balance the evolutionary tradeoff that enabled modern language. This argument suggests that if music in itself represents an environment critical for human mental health, then the contribution of electroacoustic music is vital for fresh eco-critical debate and awareness, and that an increased musical practice, especially in participatory contexts, may be essential for the human project.

Diabetes: The Biography

Diabetes: The Biography is part of the Oxford Biography of Disease Series, a collection of monographs that tell the story of one disease throughout history. In this biography, diabetic specialist Robert Tattersall traces medical and popular ideas about diabetes from its mention in an Egyptian papyrus to the present. In this remarkably succinct, comparative, and engaging book, Tattersall offers a comprehensive and thorough history that reveals many of the nuances of this disease and treatments for it. Diabetes is a complicated disease, which includes a variety of types within it, most notably type 1 and type 2. Moreover, although the twentieth-century innovations of insulin and oral hypoglycemic agents have created a rich modern history of the illness, there is a much longer history that includes efforts to explain, diagnose, cure, and treat the disease. Diabetes encompasses these stories and more, carefully conveying a narrative that highlights shifting ideology about the disease and how such ideas impacted society's response to it. Although much of the focus is centered on Europe, Tattersall is comparative throughout, considering emerging and competing ideas in North America, Asia, and elsewhere. The author is attentive to detail, and the text offers much insight about competing standards of diabetic care, the impact of twentieth-century technology, and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in response to the epidemic of diabetes.

Technology and the making of the Netherlands: the age of contested modernization, 1890-1970

This study offers both an account of twentieth-century technology in the Netherlands and a view of Dutch history through the lens of technology. It describes the trajectory of modernization through technology in certain characteristically Dutch contexts--including the omnipresence of water, the pervasiveness of urbanization coupled with a high-tech agricultural sector, and the legacy of colonialism--but at the same time makes it clear that Dutch struggles over technology choices, infrastructure development, mass production, and the role of government are comparable to the experience of any Western industrialized country. The book, which synthesizes findings originally presented in a series of seven volumes published in the Netherlands, uses the idea of contested modernization as an overarching concept through which to understand Dutch technological history. The modernizers of Dutch society--including engineers, management consultants, architects, and others--did not always agree on how to modernize; moreover, the unruliness of specific practices often derailed or redirected implementation. Tensions between top-down and bottom-up modernization, and between scale-enlargement and more flexible arrangements of mutual coordination and cooperation shaped Dutch history. The chapters examine such topics as attempts to create an industrial nation, materially connected through infrastructure; the conflicts that came with the arrival of mass production and the emergence of a consumer society; and land-use planning in a low-lying country.

Managing risk and liability associated with hip and knee implants

ABSTRACT Hip and knee replacement surgery has proven to be among the great success stories of twentieth century medicine and technology. Orthopaedic surgeons and their patients expect and demand near perfect outcomes after hip and knee replacements. However, not every patient does well nor is every surgical procedure done without unanticipated outcomes. Every implant has inherent vulnerabilities and limitations that may lead to early or late complications in some circumstances. Given this environment, hip and knee arthroplasty surgeons must understand the risks and be able to manage the liability associated with the use of these implants. This paper reviews and discusses the key related issues for the surgeon, including reduction of preventable complications, the value of total joint registries and outcomes data, potential problems with new technologies and methods, conflict of interest and product liability.

Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry by James M. Rubenstein

Book Reviews131 even say "Michigan" takes on added meaning. John Sinclair, drugs, and antiwar protests signaled the collapse of society to Hayes. The University ofMichigan became the embodiment of everything he was against. Bo lived only for football and often seemed completely disengaged from the chaotic conditions around him. Even the student body's decision to convert a halftime homecoming celebration into an antiwar rally did not faze him. Bo wanted to beat Ohio State simply because theywere the perennial obstacle keeping Michigan from the Rose Bowl. As Rosenberg notes, "Bo Schembechler was one of the guys,Woody Hayes was never one of the guys" (p. 83). Rosenberg's novel prism creates bright new windows into the familiar story of Bo andWoody. His social-history approach makes for riveting reading. And forMichigan fans addled by Ohio State's recent dominance on the field, the book might serve as a reminder that the rivalrywas once very different. It might also remind them just how differentAmerica once was aswell. Scott Beekman University of Rio Grande James M. Rubenstein. Making and SellingCars: Innovationand Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 401. Bibliography. Drawings. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paperback reissue, $35.00. That symbol of twentieth-century technology, the automobile, usually warrants a subsection in historical surveys or college courses, yet rarely is automotive history treated as a category unto itself. Instead, the history of the automobile is subdivided into specialties. Even largerworks on the subject tend toward the narrow, and holistic approaches to automotive history are generally presented as encyclopedias. Making and Selling Cars is that rare work thatmanages to create a coherent general review of the automobile. To some extent, Rubenstein's book resembles the pioneering works from the 1960s that first created "automotive history." Unlike other broad assessments, however, the author avoids chronologies and narratives. Although the book is limited primarily to theAmerican market, Making and Selling Cars achieves a larger view while presenting important details to support it. 132 MichiganHistoricalReview In exploring how automobiles are made and sold, Rubenstein addresses in one volume many of the great questions of automotive history that even more specialized studies often fail to discuss. For Rubenstein, Henry Ford's storymatters not because his innovations came first, but because they had such a broad, long-term influence. With excellent use of Ford-era primary sources, Rubenstein places the common stories of Ford and Highland Park into the fuller history of making and selling cars across the entire first century of the automobile's existence. The author's insight is achieved partially because he takes the geographer's view, tracking conditions and connections, not just actors and events. Even the most knowledgeable reader will benefit from Rubenstein's conjoining of perspectives in his exploration of both "making and selling" cars. Exploring how cars are "made" broadens the history beyond themajor industry players and emphasizes all of an automobile's parts and the complexities of joining them, including labor. And seeking to explain how cars are "sold" provides insight into the broader areas of distribution, marketing, advertising, consumerism, and the laws governing these processes. My quibbles are minimal. Although Rubenstein avoids social commentary, chapter endings tend toward unnecessary characterizations that while brief, are inconsistent with the author's larger approach. And Rubenstein treats politics rather flady, thereby missing some important influences upon industry and consumer choices and actions. Finally, since this book was first published in 2001 and intended as a millennial statement about the automobile, the first decade of the twenty-first century certainly has brought more than a few answers to questions raised by Rubenstein, and proven a few of his conclusions to be wrong. Nevertheless, the reissuing of this valuable book offers the reader of 2009 a fascinating opportunity to test the author's model. Rubenstein effectively compresses the first century of the automobile, seeing it as more alike than different. He leaves the reader with themajor questions testing the industry, seeing it as being at a crossroads where changes in direction are inevitable. The book offers a brilliant summation, and one hopes thatRubenstein may add, one day, a second volume on the automobile's first decade of...

Pixel Cowboys and Silicon Gold Mines: Videogames of the American West

This article explores representations of the American West in computer and videogames from the late 1970s through 2006. The article reveals how several titles, including the early Boot Hill (1977), invoked classic nineteenth-century western motifs, employing the six-shooter, wagon train, and iron horse to sell late twentieth-century entertainment technology to a global audience. Such games allowed players, typically adolescent males, to recreate a version of history and to participate actively in the more violent aspects of the “Wild West.” The arcade Western emerged as a subgenre within computer entertainment, offering a distinctive, interactive amalgam of popular frontier-based fictions, including the nineteenth-century dime novel, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and the modern Hollywood western. Computer technology thus served established myths surrounding the “Wild West,” even as New Western History was challenging their authenticity.

Half a Century of Digital Gaming: Game On, at the Science Museum, London, 21 October 2006-25 February 2007

Half a Century of Digital Gaming Game On, at the Science Museum, London, 21 October 2006–25 February 2007 Stefan Schmitt Less than half a century has passed since engineering students first projected interacting dots, lines, and circles onto cathode-ray screens, but today, digital gaming is big business. Its annual revenues rival those of the cinema box office in most industrialized countries, its video-game consoles receive the same attention and acclaim in the media as do more traditional consumer-electronics items, and its individual games are critically reviewed in the manner of literature, music, and films. The exhibition Game On examines the rapid evolution of digital gaming from a niche activity to a mainstream phenomenon over the last five decades, a story that ought to be of more than passing interest to historians of twentieth-century technology. For as Martin Campbell-Kelly and others have argued convincingly, any history of modern computing that purports to be thorough must include the hard- and software of interactive games.1 On the other hand, Game On demonstrates that the technology of computing is but part of the larger story of the sociotechnical realm of digital gaming. Game On debuted at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 2002. Since then it has toured the globe, appearing in museums in Scotland, Netherlands, Finland, Israel, and the United States before returning to the United Kingdom at the Science Museum, London, in October 2006. In 2007 and 2008 it will appear in Thailand and Australia. It consists of thirteen sections, the first of which explores the precommercial roots of modern gaming as well as the public-venue machines that first popularized the notion of the "video game." The second section is a series of video-game platforms of the sort that [End Page 582] brought gaming into the home during the 1970s and 1980s. Critically, the emphasis here lies not with the development of video games for general-purpose home computers, but rather with the diverse, game-only consoles that were available during those years. These sections aim to present what we might call a rough genealogy of the video-game machine. Sections three through seven examine gaming through the lens of cultural studies, detailing the present-day types or "families" of games, the sound effects used in them, the relationship between gaming and the modern cinema, and the culture of gaming in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In sections eight and nine, the exhibition adopts a more historical perspective, examining the evolution of two key types of digital games, those designed for children and those designed to allow more than one person to play at once ("multiplayer games"). Sections ten through thirteen dissect the creative process of contemporary game production, from character design and multimedia storyboarding to marketing and sales. Here the visitor is treated to an in-depth examination of the technologies and programming skills that make the modern video game possible. Of particular interest is section thirteen, which details the historical interplay between state-of-the-art gaming hardware and state-of-the-art gaming software. When Game On moved to the Science Museum, its curators decided to add a bit of contextual flair. They commissioned artist Jon Burgerman,2 for example, to produce a wall-painting time line that places key moments in the development of video gaming within their proper historical context. They also added three so-called debate walls, large panels presenting a number of hotly debated issues related to the history of gaming in an accessible manner. These supplementary elements help to better establish the connections between the gaming artifacts on display and their respective sociocultural contexts. Burgerman's time line therefore places a drawing of the PDP-1 microcomputer—the machine on which the first video game, "Spacewar," ran at MIT in 1962—alongside references to Moore's Law, the first VCR, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...

Technological semantics and technological practice: Lessons from an enigmatic episode in twentieth-century technology studies

This paper is a review of words and their meanings in the field of technology studies, and an analysis the semantics of an idealistic international technology-related social movement that flourished briefly during the second half of the twentieth century. Sloppy nomenclature employed by proponents and observers of the movement led to people with opposite views appearing to agree (and vice versa), with the consequence that the movement’s valuable policy insights exerted only marginal influence on mainstream technology policy. I conclude that poor technological semantics may undermine effective technological practice. Suggestions for a constructive technological nomenclature are presented.

Book of the Month: When Food Kills

The safety of food is possibly the oldest human preoccupation. In early prehistoric times, the need to communicate where the next meal might come from and whether it was safe to eat must have produced a strong selection pressure in favour of language acquisition. The hunter-gatherers were also learning to control fire, a hazardous technology that, among other benefits, allowed meat to be cooked and lessened the risk of consuming live parasites. So it is little wonder that in modern times so much of what we hear, what we say, and what we read centres on the same areas of concern, nor that we get our fingers burned occasionally as the food industry invents new technologies for every generation. This is a long and very rich history. Hugh Pennington, who chaired an inquiry into the 1996 Escherichia coli outbreak in Scotland, makes a clear case that these episodes are not simply the result of late twentieth century technology. In When Food Kills1 he provides a broad and well illustrated sweep of the disasters that have struck the industry in recent and not so recent times. To give an example, he records how between 1912 and 1937, some 65 000 people died of bovine tuberculosis in England and Wales through drinking cow's milk. His writing style is unusual for such an exercise—a pleasing blend of the scientific and the journalistic. What we are offered is a front-line report with the insights of a microbiologist and an admixture of personal opinion that takes the book far beyond simple documentary. Pennington deals not only with medical aspects such as molecular biology, genetics, and epidemiology, but also with the historical and sociological implications of food disasters, their impact on the status of science and the public's faith in it, and the ways that all of these fit in with disasters of other types. A theme running through the book concerns the ‘Lardner effect’—Pennington's term for the phenomenon whereby a rare disaster affecting large numbers of people at once has a much greater impact on public anxiety than an endemic background risk that in total affects a far greater number. This applies not only to foodborne infections that rarely kill, such as Campylobacter, but also to more deadly pathogens; the incidents that worry people most are those with a large number of simultaneous victims, such as acute epidemics of infection, or oil rig disasters, or motorway accidents. Nonetheless, Pennington's analysis did remind me of the opposite scenario described by Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot.2 Sagan reckoned that, when frequency is related to likely death rate, we are at greater risk of dying from asteroid impact than from a commercial plane accident; yet few of us spend much time worrying about asteroids. Perhaps the Lardner effect is overcome, and denial supervenes, when the possible devastation becomes massive. This may have happened in the 1990s when projected estimates of the scale of nvCJD cases ranged from a few dozen to several million. The most pessimistic estimates, fortunately now deemed unlikely, were simply too awful to contemplate. In his preface Pennington claims that, through a long tradition connecting Macbeth with Joseph Lister, Scotland has taken a central part in the history of foodborne disasters. In the most recent past he refers to the E. coli epidemic at Wishaw and to the emergence of nvCJD at higher incidence in Scotland and the North of England than elsewhere in the UK. Major figures in prion research before the advent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) included the Edinburgh workers Alan Dickinson, Richard Kimberlin, and Hugh Fraser. Pennington's ‘Scotland bias’ is not intended to be taken too seriously, but for the record, at least two important individuals based north of the border do not get a mention in the book. One of these is David Doyle, a Glasgow neuropathologist who was active in the early response to the emergence of BSE. The other was a dietitian, Julie Phillips, without whose knowledge of the propensity for offal to find its way into the human food chain, based on her deep Scottish roots, an early comment might not have influenced the debate at a key stage.3 It is of course the contributions these individuals made, and not their origins, that make them noteworthy. When Food Kills stands out from other accounts of the subject by providing a rich perspective that includes disasters unrelated to the food industry. I am not sure whether enduring lessons can be learnt from the linking themes, but the book deserves attention from anyone who appreciates the combined attributes of a practising microbiologist, a scientific authority and a broadly read thinker. That should be all of us.

When Food Kills

The safety of food is possibly the oldest human preoccupation. In early prehistoric times, the need to communicate where the next meal might come from and whether it was safe to eat must have produced a strong selection pressure in favour of language acquisition. The hunter-gatherers were also learning to control fire, a hazardous technology that, among other benefits, allowed meat to be cooked and lessened the risk of consuming live parasites. So it is little wonder that in modern times so much of what we hear, what we say, and what we read centres on the same areas of concern, nor that we get our fingers burned occasionally as the food industry invents new technologies for every generation. This is a long and very rich history. Hugh Pennington, who chaired an inquiry into the 1996 Escherichia coli outbreak in Scotland, makes a clear case that these episodes are not simply the result of late twentieth century technology. In When Food Kills1 he provides a broad and well illustrated sweep of the disasters that have struck the industry in recent and not so recent times. To give an example, he records how between 1912 and 1937, some 65 000 people died of bovine tuberculosis in England and Wales through drinking cow's milk. His writing style is unusual for such an exercise—a pleasing blend of the scientific and the journalistic. What we are offered is a front-line report with the insights of a microbiologist and an admixture of personal opinion that takes the book far beyond simple documentary. Pennington deals not only with medical aspects such as molecular biology, genetics, and epidemiology, but also with the historical and sociological implications of food disasters, their impact on the status of science and the public's faith in it, and the ways that all of these fit in with disasters of other types. A theme running through the book concerns the ‘Lardner effect’—Pennington's term for the phenomenon whereby a rare disaster affecting large numbers of people at once has a much greater impact on public anxiety than an endemic background risk that in total affects a far greater number. This applies not only to foodborne infections that rarely kill, such as Campylobacter, but also to more deadly pathogens; the incidents that worry people most are those with a large number of simultaneous victims, such as acute epidemics of infection, or oil rig disasters, or motorway accidents. Nonetheless, Pennington's analysis did remind me of the opposite scenario described by Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot.2 Sagan reckoned that, when frequency is related to likely death rate, we are at greater risk of dying from asteroid impact than from a commercial plane accident; yet few of us spend much time worrying about asteroids. Perhaps the Lardner effect is overcome, and denial supervenes, when the possible devastation becomes massive. This may have happened in the 1990s when projected estimates of the scale of nvCJD cases ranged from a few dozen to several million. The most pessimistic estimates, fortunately now deemed unlikely, were simply too awful to contemplate. In his preface Pennington claims that, through a long tradition connecting Macbeth with Joseph Lister, Scotland has taken a central part in the history of foodborne disasters. In the most recent past he refers to the E. coli epidemic at Wishaw and to the emergence of nvCJD at higher incidence in Scotland and the North of England than elsewhere in the UK. Major figures in prion research before the advent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) included the Edinburgh workers Alan Dickinson, Richard Kimberlin, and Hugh Fraser. Pennington's ‘Scotland bias’ is not intended to be taken too seriously, but for the record, at least two important individuals based north of the border do not get a mention in the book. One of these is David Doyle, a Glasgow neuropathologist who was active in the early response to the emergence of BSE. The other was a dietitian, Julie Phillips, without whose knowledge of the propensity for offal to find its way into the human food chain, based on her deep Scottish roots, an early comment might not have influenced the debate at a key stage.3 It is of course the contributions these individuals made, and not their origins, that make them noteworthy. When Food Kills stands out from other accounts of the subject by providing a rich perspective that includes disasters unrelated to the food industry. I am not sure whether enduring lessons can be learnt from the linking themes, but the book deserves attention from anyone who appreciates the combined attributes of a practising microbiologist, a scientific authority and a broadly read thinker. That should be all of us.

Review: Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine

Review: Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine