Blackwell Reference Online

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Americans live lives saturated with technology. They are certainly not unique in that, but this is no reason not to accept responsibility for attempting to discover how that happened, what shape it takes, and what it means. This Companion is designed to give us a place to start on that voyage of self-discovery. First let us deal with the problem of definition. Those of us who study technology for a living are often challenged to define what that is. In fact, no single definition has been imposed upon the authors because, in my opinion at least, no single definition is possible. This is not because defining technology is difficult – indeed, the problem is the opposite: it is all too easy. Such chestnuts as “applied science” or “the tools with which we make things” spring to mind, but are immediately seen as too partial to serve. As Leo Marx has famously pointed out, the word itself is of fairly recent origin. For most of American history such phrases as the mechanical , the practical or industrial arts stood for the stock of tools we used and the knowledge of how to use them. Technology , as both a word and a concept, replaced these older terms, in Marx's estimation, sometime between the two world wars. During the period roughly from 1880 to 1920, he claims, both the character and representation of “technology” changed dramatically, eliding the accustomed identification of ... log in or subscribe to read full text