Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

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 tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age: as children, we play with technological toys, trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances: Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making.

In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies.

He asks:

• Can we define technology?
• Does technology shape us, or do we shape it?
• Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)
• How do historians understand it?
• Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities?
• Should the market choose our technologies?
• Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers?
• Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice?

These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them: to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, live along some distant day into the answers.

"A deeply informed historian who writes with impressive clarity, David Nye persuades us in Technology Matters that we should ask the kind of life-shaping questions about technology that we customarily pose about politics and economics. He does not finally answer the timely questions that he explicates, but provokes us to search for our own answers." Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture

"Applying the lessons of history to modern-day dilemmas, Nye defies much common wisdom about the power of technology in society. With irony and wit, he exhorts us not to succumb to defeatist notions of technological determinism but to take charge of our own human destinies." Arthur Molella, Director, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution

"In the field of technology studies, David Nye stands out for his ability to distill complex issues into concise frameworks. This book masterfully crystallizes debates about the social and cultural impact of technology into ten questions that in their very asking demonstrate how philosophical concerns about technology are, as always, concerns about ourselves." Marita Sturken, Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University

"Are our technologies improving our lives or limiting our horizons and endangering our very existence? The issues pertaining to the role of technology on earth are complex and ever more urgent, and Nye provides an invaluably methodical and provocative." Booklist

Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that clarify what technology is and why it matters.

David E. Nye is Professor of Comparative American Studies and History at Warwick University.