Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (review)

In this wonderful little book, Hughes draws upon a lifetime of learning and scholarship to reflect upon technological change and its relationship to other components of culture, most notably religion, values, politics, and artistic expression.

Hughes is best known for his conception of technology as the history of expanding systems, a framework of analysis that currently dominates the history of technology and played an important role in the rise of social constructivism among historians. His systems approach is best elaborated in his classic study, Networks of Power (Baltimore, 1983) and, more recently, in Rescuing Prometheus (New York, 1998). In all of his publications, Hughes seeks to disabuse those who view technology simply as "gadgets" and/or the engine of inevitable progress. For him, "technology is messy and complex. It . . . is full of contradiction, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences" (1). One of the most refreshing aspects of this book is Hughes' candor. Having pointed to "the Janus face of technology," he readily admits that "traces of my enthusiasm still come through in my publications, especially this one" (5). Yet, when all is said and done, there is a critical edge to this work that comes through loud and clear, especially in his final chapter on the need to foster an "ecotechnological environment."

In moving toward that end, Hughes develops three overarching themes and places them in chronological context. The first, developed in Chapter 2, is technology's relationship to what Hughes refers to as "the Second Creation." Echoing Merton, he probes the religious and cultural contexts of technological change in Western civilization from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, arguing that mastery over nature was a deeply held tenet of Christian religion, perhaps best expressed by "the Puritans of New England, [who] believed that the second creation of the New World would bring the millennium" (27).¹ The second theme is the idea of "technology as machine" (Chapter 3), an exploration of the so-called electrical-mechanical age (c. 1900–1940), which was epitomized by the maturation of science-based industry, mass production, and the modern metropolis. The third and final theme is the idea of "technology as systems, controls, and information" (Chapter 4), which embraces the period since World War II and treats large-scale complexity as embodied in modern weapons systems, the military-industrial complex, the spread of the systems approach to the private sector, and the onset of the computer-driven information revolution.

In each of these three periods, Hughes points to the emergence of management practices aimed at coordinating and controlling new technologies. Equally important, each chapter contains a discussion not only of the proponents of technological progress but also skeptics who expressed doubts and criticisms about the impact of new technologies. What distinguishes Hughes' analysis is his balanced assessment of inventors, developers, enthusiasts, and critics of technological change.

Upon providing an extremely revealing discussion of twentieth-century German and American art and architecture in a chapter entitled "Technology and Culture," Hughes ends his reflection on the human-built world with an impassioned call for "Creating an Ecotechnological Environment" in which the natural and human-built worlds can intersect and overlap. He chides critics who point "accusatory fingers at developers, architects, engineers, and planners" for despoiling the environment, arguing instead that we, the people, have no one to blame but ourselves because "we commission, fund, and elect them to fulfill our goals" (154). The only way out of this predicament, in Hughes' view, is for the public to become more technologically literate and engaged in negotiating the messy political, economic, social, and moral problems that arise with the introduction of new technologies.

Rather than applauding top-down "technological fixes," which often prove problematical, Hughes calls for more activist "socially constructed" technology policies that involve a wide spectrum of organizations and individuals in making choices about "the characteristics of the technology they use and the effects that...