Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (review)
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Do not be deceived: this work may be short and written for the general public, but this senior statesman of our field distills a great deal into Human-Built World. After a brief review of earlier times, Thomas Hughes's five main chapters move topically from around 1750 to the present, drawing primarily on American and German examples. While Hughes necessarily takes up themes well-known to readers of this journal, the illustrations may be unfamiliar. He argues that particularly after the industrial revolution, Western cultures reconstructed the material world and reconceived their relationship [End Page 626] to nature, as people "believed that they had the creative technological power to make a world according to their own blueprints" (p. 9).
The second chapter concerns the transformation of the landscape into a "second creation." While the United States is the focus, Goethe's Faust also exemplifies this process: Faust's greatest temptation was not sex, money, or political power, but rather the satisfactions of a vast engineering project. Chapter 3 examines American and German responses to both technology and consumer abundance in the early twentieth century. Chapter 4 takes the story forward to large systems, controls, and cybernetics, culminating in the realization that the United States "had become the unchallenged world master of technological forces." If Norbert Weiner and George Gilder celebrate this mastery, Manuel Castells analyzes disequilibrium in the emerging global economy. Chapter 5 turns to artists and architects, moving from the technological values of precisionism and the international style to rejections of order and control in the second half of the twentieth century. The final chapter suggests that we can resolve these tensions by giving up on technological fixes and thinking in terms of an "ecotechnological environment" where nature and the human-built interpenetrate.
Because Human-Built World is a book for the nonspecialist and seeks to promote technological literacy, footnotes are omitted in favor of a twenty-eight-page annotated bibliography that parallels the chapter subsections, more than fifty of them—few scholars master so wide a literature as Hughes. The form of the book also lends itself to the lecturer who needs a lucid three-page sketch of technology in the work of Emerson, Perry Miller, Spengler, Beard, Sombart, Rathenau, or Mumford, or the representations of machinery by Duchamp, Sheeler, or Bourke-White. If a doctoral thesis crawls over one patch of ground, this book jets over the landscape of our discipline, emphasizing its adjacence to art, architecture, literature, and environmental history. Such a panorama necessarily has to limit itself, and some simplification is unavoidable. The technologies of the non-Western world are only glimpsed on the horizon, and Hughes does not engage Heideggerian critiques. What he has done is distill much of our discipline into small compass. Human-Built World can serve as the framework for an undergraduate course, but it deserves a wider audience and the publisher should speedily make it available in paperback in order to stimulate public interest in the relationships between technology and culture.
Dr. Nye is professor of history at the University of Warwick in Coventry. His recent books include America as Second Creation (2003), and his Questioning Technology is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2006.
