Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

摘要: Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old solve new problems inventing elegant solutions tasks. Perhaps this we are intimate with devices machines an early age -- as children, play technological toys: trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these imagine ourselves into a creative relationship the world. As adults, retain playfulness gadgets appliances Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. use technology shape world, yet think little about choices making. In Matters, Nye tackles ten questions technology, integrating half-century of ideas cogent concise chapters, wide-ranging historical examples many societies. He asks: Can define technology? Does us, or do it? Is inevitable unpredictable? (Why experts often fail get right?)? How historians understand Are modern create cultural uniformity, diversity? To abundance, ecological crisis? destroy jobs opportunities? Should "the market" choose technologies? Do advanced technologies make us secure, escalate dangers? ubiquitous expand mental horizons, encapsulate artifice? These large may no final answers yet, but need wrestle them live them, so that may, Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day answers."