Technology Matters: Questions to Live with

This book aims to help people think about life in an intensely technological world, and addresses questions that the ordinary person wants answering, but which specialists avoid. It provides a fascinating historical assessment of how technology and culture have shaped each other over the ages.

Nye's theory is that technologies are social constructs, and he sets out to prove this by showing that from our earliest years we imagine and construct through technologies. They play a key role in our lives, yet we do not pay much attention to the machines and systems that surround us. Most technologies have a long gestation between invention and widespread adoption. As a result, their social significance is not always apparent. Do technologies shape us, or we them?

The uses to which, people put technologies are often unexpected and non‐utilitarian. Electricity, the telephone, radio, TV, the computer and the Internet are not unyielding forces moving through history, but social processes that vary over time and from culture to culture. As societies adopt more technology, their cultural lives are likely to become more uniform and standardized.

Technologies can destroy as well as protect the natural world, and Nye suggests that in the West we use technologies to create abundance at high environmental cost, but questions whether we are happier than earlier generations. One of his quotes concludes that “men have become the tool of their tools”, so that people have easily become slaves to what they own.

Does technology undermine or enhance democracy? Contrasting evidence is presented on the effects of market forces, dominant large corporations, and government's role in achieving stability. In the workplace it both destroys jobs and creates new opportunities. Computerisation is replacing many white‐collar workers as electronic transactions through the Internet are used increasingly to make applications, pay bills and track deliveries. Thus computers have demystified management by making work more transparent, increasing the pressure on all to perform. For the feminists, there are some powerful arguments that technologies are socially shaped to perpetuate pre‐existing cultural values and male privilege. There is no automatic correlation between technological advance and greater equality for women.

Technology has supported the outsourcing of large areas of work leading to mass unemployment or increased income inequality. In the “new economy” many now work longer hours with less security, lower wages and are exploited by some employers. Others accept a longer working week, as it provides extra money to acquire consumer goods. A third group called “symbolic analysts” – people who solve, identify and broker new problems – embrace the use of new technologies and more efficient processes to increase their workload to support exotic life styles.

This book benefits from the historian's ability to take a “grand sweep” and challenge our assumptions about how technology and social structures have and continue to interact. It presents multiple perspectives on controversial questions, and encourages us to seek our own answers. Nye's work is stimulating, provocative and well worth reading.