Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (review)

Most everyone who sees it loves Google Earth, but nearly all of us are uneasy about globalization and global warming, and we sense that technology has something to do with it. Help is at hand. In Technology Matters, David Nye "addresses general questions that ordinary people ask but specialists often overlook" (p. xi). He poses ten "central and unavoidable questions," discusses the evidence evenhandedly, and offers a personal point of view, but never becomes strident or polemical. Roughly the first third of the book explores questions about the "nature" of technology, the middle third examines various aspects of technology and culture, and the final chapters deal with contemporary concerns.

The early chapters exploring the nature of technology are Nye at his best. While many of us resist giving a definition of technology, he confronts this task squarely with a wide review ranging among animals, tool-making, Native Americans, and world's fairs, speckled with quotations from such figures as Walter Benjamin and Cyril Stanley Smith. Nye inclines to the view that a modern-day understanding of technology came into existence rather late, in the wake of the marginalization of women from the useful arts and professional engineering. Next comes a chapter that at once skewers technological determinism and makes clear that it remains a staple of popular discourse. Here Nye deftly sketches Japan's rejection of gunpowder weapons, the North African world's refusal of the wheel, and the Mennonite and Amish communities' cautious assessment of many technologies. He also critically reviews the long arc of deterministic commentary stretching from Karl Marx and William Ogburn to Marshall McLuhan and Michel Foucault. Paired with this is a neat summary of the many problems involved in attempting to predict and forecast technical developments. Nye focuses on cases embracing the user heuristic, such as that of AT&T's picture phone, launched with great fanfare at the 1964 World's Fair but destined for the dustbin. A parallel observation is that technologies developed for one use or context, such as the telephone or the internet, often acquire other unforeseen uses and meanings across time. A resume of contextualist writings on the history of technology rounds out the theme.

Nye's middle chapters address value-laden questions about technology and culture. To begin, he asks whether technologies promote cultural uniformity or foster cultural diversity. After reviewing such critics of "mass society" as Thorstein Veblen, who argued that "the machine pervades modern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense" (p. 68), Nye offers such contrary and nondeterministic examples as the personalizing of the Levittown suburb, mobile phones, department stores, and the internet. And just before a consumer's utopia blooms, he reminds us that diversity in the supermarket supply of ethnic foods relies on "capitalist rationalization, packaging, and distribution," and at the level of these technological systems "most differences evaporate" (p. 83).

Curiously, Nye's next two chapters slip somewhat out of focus. His environmental chapter gets a bit bogged down with contrasting varied technological optimists and such oft-quoted pessimists as William Blake, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry David Thoreau. And while Nye competently reviews the mixed record on technology and work, it is difficult to balance the "extreme routinization" evident at McDonald's and Wal-Mart with the consumer-driven cultural diversity hinted at in his previous chapters. Finally, while social values can and should guide society in selecting technologies, he maintains that we need a stronger institutional base, such as that provided by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (1972–95) and its European counterparts, and various means for communicating public assessments to corporate and governmental decision makers.

Technology Matters concludes with three chapters that deal with our present situation. The September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq are present in his treatment of security issues, though they are not the focus. Rather, Nye evaluates the mixed record on whether technologies have enhanced or eroded the world's security, drawing many examples from the imperialist...