Narratives of Technology by J. M. van der Laan (review)

Readers of this journal will know John Staudenmaier’s classic Technology’s Storytellers as an essential study of SHOT methodologies in practice. J. M. van der Laan makes no reference to Staudenmaier’s classic, presumably because he is primarily interested in literature and popular culture (including film and advertising), not the writings of historians. A wide-ranging survey like Narratives of Technology suggests how SHOT’s subject matter appears to some scholars in the humanities and communication. Rather than attack this book because it ignores rather than extends Stauden-maier’s, one might assign both works to graduate students, in order to acquaint them with both outsider and insider views of technological narrative. Van der Laan examines narratives of technology from ancient Greece to the present, recognizing in his first chapter that while “technology expands and enhances our abilities, it also reduces them,” as Socrates lamented in Plato’s “Phaedrus” (p. 17).

After an overview of the evolution and definition of technology, chapter two does the same for narrative beginning with Prometheus, Daedalus, and Icarus, discussing Biblical stories, but moving quickly to recent times. Chapter three argues there is a dominant narrative that “celebrates and champions technology” whose origins he traces from the thirteenth century through Descartes to the Enlightenment and on to the present, a story which “promises entry into paradise, where safety and wholeness, plenty and happiness, freedom, harmony, and peace will at last be ours” (p. 71). Chapter four then examines the dissenting narrative that criticizes technology. Following Thomas Hughes, he argues it emerged with industrialization and only became conspicuous after 1800 in works of Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Edward Sapir, Friedrich Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and recent environmental critics.

After these chapters, the author might have focused on the conflict between these two narratives in the following forty-page survey of technology in literature from ancient to recent times. However, the many short plot summaries are organized chronologically, with digressions into children’s literature and science fiction. This survey provides a backdrop for close readings of Faust as a story of fulfillment through technology (chapter 6) and of Frankenstein as a tale of technological failure (chapter 7). The final three chapters discuss technologies in films (pp. 187–202), the presentation of technology in advertising (203–19), and the transformation of narrative by social media (pp. 221–36). In conclusion, van der Laan rejects “the myth of technological progress, of unlimited possibility, and of perfectibility” as being “untrue. Technology has failed to make us better human beings.” Worse, the technological lifeworld disrupts narrative itself and “disconnects us from reality and separates us from one another.” (pp. 235–36).

If van der Laan cannot be comprehensive, he sketches many fictional works in a few words, develops key examples in detail, and creates a framework that can be applied to further reading. But though he deftly delineates many works, including some that are not familiar, he posits an oversimplified dualism. There are far more than just two technological narratives in popular culture. Consider the following ten, which do not exhaust the possibilities: technological hubris leads to spectacular failure; machines are deterministic agents of inevitable change; corporations with different technologies struggle to dominate a market; society takes technology for granted and collapses because it fails to maintain it; an Orwellian government manipulates technologies for social control at the cost of diversity and freedom; adopting a particular technology leads to the reverse of what was desired; a society uses technology to accelerate time and compress space with both beneficial and disturbing consequences; adoption of technologies proves environmentally destructive until other technologies are developed and substituted; machines with artificial intelligence seize control from mankind, leading to conflict; human beings misuse military technologies with catastrophic results; and finally the post-apocalyptic narrative, in which remnants of humanity learn to survive using simple technologies. Rather than sorting popular technological narratives into just two categories, a seminar on this subject...