The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems (review)

The essays in this volume explore the tension among political machinations, human habits, and technological choices. In varied contexts, technologies find expression, arouse conflict, and, ultimately, redefine problems.

Lisa Rosner has organized her book into four sections. In the first one, Shelley McKellar, Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, and Jim Tobias, in their respective essays on artificial hearts, the I-ON-A-CO electrotherapy device, and assistive devices intended for the differently abled, explore the contrast between the inelastic demand for improved health and the public, often promotional, representations of wellness.

In the second section on food, Michael Ackerman, Shane Hamilton, and Warren Belasco discuss the nutritional enrichment of flour, long-haul trucking, and imagined food technologies as political, nutritional, and cultural artifacts. Although demand for food technologies is diluted somewhat by the bounty of twentieth-century production and the aesthetic dimension of eating, these essays demonstrate that perceptions of the relationship between food and technology remain heavily influenced by their political and cultural context. Indeed, the ubiquity of the demand for food encourages faith in a future made better, safer, or easier through the panacea of technology.

The third section, which is organized around the broadly construed topic of environment, brings to mind Melvin Kranzberg's notion of invention being the "mother of necessity." In essays that consider technology as Prometheus or Pandora, Timothy LeCain, Frank Uekoetter, and James R. Fleming describe technologies that have been assigned the hopeless task of compensating for unfortunate trajectories of human material culture. These analyze techno-fixes in American mining, the emerging conflict between professional engineers and skilled workers related to pollution control during the early 1900s, the dubious efficacy and political life of cloud seeding, and overall the iterative nature of technological development in which each new real or imagined fix creates new sets of problems that are vulnerable to further flawed technological solutions.

In the book's closing section, titled "Fixing Business," the contributors attempt to reconcile technological fixes with the dynamics of change in business and government. Paul Ceruzzi charts the flux of technological change across the Internet—a system itself composed largely of technological fixes. In the virtual world he describes, the staggering pace and fluid direction of development constantly transform the parameters of usability, success, and impact. In their essay on business technologies, Onno De Wit, Jan Van den Ende, Johan Schot, and Ellen Van Oost track the interplay of successive regimes of artifacts with the business and social systems that govern their utilization.

Because these essays work well beyond the theoretical limitations of the "technological fix," they indicate that technology is an activity retaining the contentious, political, imaginative, and gullible nature of humanity. By claiming a "distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution," the book's editor, Lisa Rosner, suggests that technical merits can be judged apart from the human context. Such a conclusion implies that some technologies exist as unqualified successes while others are ersatz ploys flawed by unsystematic development, tainted by greed, or irretrievably constrained by their ethical or political environment. Crossing beyond the rhetorical qualities of "fix" to judge the genealogy of technologies in the physical world suggests an anachronistic privileging of perspective. Whether a technology is a fix or a genuine solution is wholly a matter of perspective; if, for example, the I-ON-A-CO rings studied by de la Peña offered relief to patients, were they not a successful treatment despite now being considered quackery? Unlike scientific projects more familiar to Rosner, the technological environment values more empirical qualities such as cost, speed, and results over abstract truths.

Technologies represent the best solution available under a given set of constraints, and someday most technologies will likely be seen as crude fixes. Just as with "solutions," the term "fix" describes nothing more or less than a project whose design, creation, and perceived merits are utterly dependent on context. Indeed, Rosner confesses that...