To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer
goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress"
in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television
screens. In "Human-Built World," thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores
to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by
chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential
Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character
but who also explored its creative potential.
Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and
architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and
culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an
"ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems.
From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to
the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of
Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology
has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different
eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas
Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could
be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis
Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing
mechanization of American life.
Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side,
demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology
is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by
occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In
"Human-Built World," he offers the highly engaging history of these
contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that
resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in
fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
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