Deconstructing Technology and Culture

I joined SHOT sometime in the mid-1960s mainly to get Technology and Culture, which has provided me with interesting and thought-provoking reading ever since. My reading wasn't close or well informed, because my concept of history was rather naive and simplistic (I was trained as a mechanical engineer and stayed in that field until retiring in 1995). Nevertheless, I strolled blissfully through T&C, looking for interesting tidbits that I could pick up and perhaps use for anecdotes in my lectures. Lacking shelf space, I clipped articles and reviews from T&C and filed them away. I'm not sure exactly which year I joined SHOT, but the oldest article in my file is Peter Drucker's "The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons," from the April 1966 issue.

When I retired and had to clean out my office, it was easy to get rid of some things: old course records, desk copies of textbooks, and hundreds of pounds of memos and records—the jetsam of faculty committees. But I couldn't bear to recycle my history of technology file or some more recent issues of Technology and Culture that I hadn't yet gone through carefully. Up until about 1992 I had faithfully practiced a rigorous program of triage, recycling some issues in toto, others only after removing and saving selected articles, and retaining a select few intact. After 1992 the unread issues began to pile up, and they continued to do so after my retirement. The pile finally got so tall that our cats started jumping up on it to look out the window, often with disastrous results. So last week I decided that it was time, again, to perform triage.

It's not easy to tear articles out of T&C, because they are bound for a long shelf life and fastened to the cover with a tenacious high-tech adhesive. Careful dissection of a recent issue indicates that the bound edges of the pages are serrated before a layer of adhesive is applied. This turns what should be the simple removal of an article or book review into an exercise in frustration, because the paper tends to tear at the serration. Often the tear propagates inward toward the text rather than toward the next serration. (Back when there were aeronautical engineers, they told a joke about a mechanic at an aircraft factory advising the engineers that they could solve the problem of their new plane's wings falling off in flight by drilling a row of holes through the wing at its root. When the engineers finally in desperation try this and it works, they ask the mechanic in amazement how he knew. He replies [in the polite version], "Did you ever see a paper towel tear along the line?") Since I have not yet learned the techniques of the vandals who cut pages out of library books, I end up with lots of torn pages. The next steps of the process—the trimming of the rough edges of the pages, putting them back into proper order, and stapling them together—are also not easy. Pages get lost or stapled to different articles, and the hardest part is remembering to copy the other side of pages that have portions of two different articles I want to save. I have spent many hours recently engaged in this process, covering only a few years of T&C. I'm thankful that there are only four issues per year!

Of course, the thing that slows me down the most is not tearing out and reassembling pages. As anyone who recycles newspapers knows, it's reading articles one missed that eats up time on the second go-round. No wonder the Collier brothers, like the café proprietor in Carson McCullers's novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, simply kept all their old newspapers for comfort, security, or future reference. And T&C is surely much more worthy of saving than newspapers. (A famous French...