The Birth of Now

The period extending from the final quarter of the nineteenth century through to the first quarter of the twentieth appears from today’s vantage point transformative. Under the glare of bright electric lights, these were Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’. Along with the famous fin-de-siècle gloom came radical innovations that changed the world. Key markers of change in this period were to be found in its cultural productions, political ideas and social relations. But the real signifiers of change were things: the new material artefacts that appeared in people’s lives, affecting them in unprecedented ways. The importance of these things is evident from the rise of the many cultural forms that sought to engage with them, from science fiction to the techno-fetishist imaginings of the Futurists and eventually the Modernist movement, with its particular ambivalence toward technological change. These developments found parallels in politics, where national governments moved quickly to encourage, and to restrict, technological innovations which would eventually have far-reaching implications for both work and home lives.

Considering how much our world has been affected by machines it seems urgent that historians attend to these developments. Did the atom bomb cause the end of the Second World War, the automobile the rise of the suburbs, the Pill the 1960s sexual revolution? In other words, does technology drive history? The question, posed by Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith in 1994 and now central to the emerging field of the philosophy of technology,¹ has received scant attention from historical scholars. Historians find it difficult to analyse ‘things’ because ascribing agency to inanimate objects is too fraught with difficulties. Nonetheless the mainstream presses are busy marketing micro-histories of objects, from tea and coffee to mini-skirts, airplanes, and car-bombs. Academic histories of technology, on the other hand, tend to remain outside the grand canvas of History. Sequestered and isolated, falling between disciplines, the history of technology is often left to ‘in-house’ or ‘company’ historians whose approach has been not so much history-from-below as history-from-belowthe- bonnet: uncritical story-telling that remains in thrall to its subject. It is perhaps with such writing in mind that David Edgerton opens The Shock of the Old with the comment that ‘Much of what is written on the history of technology is for boys of all ages. This book is a history for grown-ups of all genders’.

In the course of fulfilling this claim Edgerton’s first popular book seeks to address such shortcomings. His aim, as the subtitle suggests, is to connect the stories of technology to the global story of the twentieth century. At first sight The Shock of the Old brings to a general audience points that Edgerton has been making for many years. However, as well as introducing vivid new material from a wide range of sources, Edgerton has taken this opportunity to hone his arguments into a taut and persuasive polemic which argues for a recasting of the entire field.

Edgerton’s claim is that the discourse of technology – whether conducted by historians discussing its past or by governments deciding investment priorities for the future – is coloured by a deep and pervasive bias towards ‘innovation’. This focus on the ‘new’ arises because the stories we tell about technology come mainly from the interested promoters of new technology themselves. In answer to the question ‘does technology drive history?’ Edgerton’s response would be ‘yes, but not in the way we think it does’. If we truly want to determine the significance of a given technology then we need a range of analytical approaches which consider not only its novelty but its usage. This shift in emphasis from innovation to use has been the central concern of Edgerton’s work and is achieved here by refocusing the lens through which we...