Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPEncyclopedias come in many varieties. Diderot's Encyclopédie is a masterpiece of philosophy and literary style; the Baseball Encyclopedia is short on weighty pensées, but it does reveal that Moses Solomon of the New York Giants was nicknamed "The Rabbi of Swat." Each kind has certain situations where it is indispensable, and most of us have had the experience of searching like Goldilocks through different reference sources to find one with the proper fact density.
Evaluating an encyclopedia, then, requires a knowledge of whom it is meant for and what it is trying to do. Even a cursory examination of Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia shows that it is intended as a map of current scholarly inquiry rather than a look-something-up reference. Typical sentences begin: "Academic ethicists divide ethical arguments into . . ." (p. 37), or "Multisited ethnographies aim to provide a new understanding of . . ." (p. 288). The index mentions Thomas Edison just six times, three of which turn out to be single sentences; Shockley, Lavoisier, and Lister, among other prominent figures, get no mention at all.
Taken together, the encyclopedia's 150-plus article topics provide a good picture of the breadth of current STS research, with entries ranging in focus [End Page 879] from narrow ("Tuskegee Project") to broad ("Invention in History and Culture") to theoretical ("Concepts of Nature") to metaphysical ("Knowledge Construction").
In general, the more specific the title of an entry, the more down-to-earth it is. Rudi Volti, for example, heroically compresses the entire history of the automobile into a page and a half, hitting all the high points and throwing in a few unexpected facts along the way. Michèle Martin's "The Telephone" is virtually devoid of wires and switches, but gives a fascinating account of how the telephone, its users, and its service providers have influenced and interacted with one another. Leslie Brothers's "Brain and Mind Sciences" is an excellent and easily understood account of the current state of research in cognition.
As in any good multiauthor encyclopedia, some entries are idiosyncratic. "Sex and the Body in Science" is almost completely devoted to a consideration of intersexuality and the transgendered. "Representation and Science," in classic philosophical form, barely gets beyond asking what is meant by the word representation, while "Representation and Technology" is entirely concerned with medical imaging and the Global Positioning System. Most directly on point for readers of Technology and Culture is the umbrella entry "Technology in History," which is divided into eight sub-entries covering different parts of the world. These will be particularly useful for scholars seeking an entry point into the technological history of a particular region, or those whose work touches on, say, African or Latin American technology, but not enough to read an entire treatise on the subject.
Although history receives scant attention in many of the entries (there is virtually none under "Computers," for example), technology and science are treated evenhandedly throughout, in contrast to some works that view these twins like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their 1988 film of that name. There is a list of authors at the end, but no indication there of which articles they are responsible for, and STS veterans can make a surprisingly entertaining game out of guessing who wrote what. The book contains no illustrations and very few charts.
Researchers trying to familiarize themselves with contemporary thinking on a broad subject will usually find something helpful here, with copious bibliographies pointing to further information. Those seeking basic facts about a specific technology will often be disappointed. Students scouting for a paper topic will find plenty of points to investigate further, and those with a general interest in STS will enjoy browsing. For neophytes, the book gives a good idea of what the field is about, though expecting them to grasp some of...
