Chris Anderson’s recent piece in Wired online inspired a completely unsurprising reaction among the technoscenti online, but also more references to work in Technology and Culture than we see in a typical week. Anderson’s piece, which more or less departs from the observation that the browser-based Web is accounting for less and less Internet traffic [...]

The history of technology is one of those subjects that most people know more about than they realize. Not so the history of the word itself. Why is that important? The emergence of a keyword in public discourse—whether a newly coined word or an old word invested with new meaning—can be in itself an illuminating historical event. What prompted the emergence of technology—the concept, the word, the purported thing itself? What changes created the conceptual void that needed filling?

Winchester has grasped only part of what drove Joseph Needham, and of what he set out to do in and through Science and Civilisation in China. Needham’s discoveries about China are reduced essentially to a list of neat stuff invented there. But the true magic of SCC—invisible in this account—lies in its detailed attention to the mechanics, or the organics as the case may be, of mills, alchemical procedures, medical therapeutics, or algebraic calculations. This is the level at which it embeds technical devices and scientific ideas in a conceptual and cultural matrix, links poetry and mechanics, medicine and cosmology, ecology and architecture, science and civilization.

In 1964, the Digital Equipment Corporation introduced a computer of radical design, the PDP-6. This was the machine that opened up people’s eyes to see that computers, when coupled with human intellect, would change the world in ways far beyond what they were already doing in the fields of finance, business, and science.

In the last generation, public policies in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the rich world have placed enormous rhetorical emphasis on the need for increased “innovation,” which has been reflected in increased institutional support for implicitly instrumentally useful social and historical studies of technological change. In the historiography of technology too there has been a strong focus on novelty, on radical breaks with the past. We in the academy are supposed to have got past unreflexive progress-talk, and are now (in theory, and in Theory) eclectic, playful with time, and open to the marginal. But, in historiographical pronouncements that introduce and summarize new work, a very old-fashioned and narrow progressivism is prevalent. What is the history of technology the history of? What, in practice, is meant by technology in histories, and what is meant by history in histories of technology?

The history of medieval and early modern technology is being actively pursued on numerous fronts by historians from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds—but the Society for the History of Technology has made a radically presentist turn. This is a loss: it cuts the history of technology as a discipline off from its own history in the early twentieth century, and makes the extensive ongoing work of historians of premodern technology far less available to historians focused on more recent history.

Technology is not simply embedded in our culture, it is a distinctive part of it. It is too easy to construct cultural history, especially of technology, as somehow feminine, in contrast to the manly interrogation of the economic, political, and social relationships of technology—that a focusing on culture is a kind of intellectual consumption of the understandings produced by a more masculine scholarship. In fact, cultural history poses profound political, analytical, and epistemological questions.

Cronon’s study of nineteenth-century Chicago focused on the inseparable coexistence of city and country, tracing the journeys of goods and people—railroads, wheat, hogs, lumber, manufactured goods, credit flows—into and out of town. The central thesis is that neither the city nor its hinterland—and, by extension, neither natural nor unnatural, human nor nonhuman—can be understood independently.

Referees are the core of a journal like T&C, and so a recent front-page New York Times article on online peer review caught the eye. The focus of the piece is Shakespeare Quarterly‘s experiment with an “open-review process” for a special issue on Shakespeare and new media. If it ends up reading like a pretty [...]