Signifying Semantics for a History of Technology

It has been almost twenty years to the day since, as a young graduate student, I was confronted with a most disconcerting discovery: my approved thesis proposal, "The Changing Meanings of Gender and Technology: Engineering in the U.S., 1880–1945," seemed to be based on quicksand.

In 1984, the academic vocabulary had just been enlarged by Joan Scott's seminal article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis";¹ and the notion of gender-as-category seemed to provide a useful tool for examining not only the relations between men and women, but also the politics of representations of masculinity and femininity. I assumed, perhaps naively, that technology was grounded in a material reality, and thought I needed no theorization or explanation—nothing beyond a handy working definition, in other words—to begin my intellectual enterprise. The Oxford English Dictionary and the then-current fifteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica served as the most logical starting point. Indeed, the encyclopedia's article "Technology" by Eugene Ferguson (1917–2004) and Melvin Kranzberg (1916–1996) provided the lemma—I had not yet discovered that in the 1960s and 1970s these "founding fathers" of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) sought to establish not only a journal called Technology and Culture, but also the history of technology as a new domain of knowledge. Feeling myself safely anchored in reality, I thus ventured back in time to examine earlier editions of the Encyclopædia, some dozen others in that bibliographical genre, and the Library of Congress history of classification to see how the term had been treated in the past, only to find that none of these sources carried such a rubric prior to the 1950s. In fact, if it appeared at all, it seemed to focus on a field of study, not a historical object or force. Confronted with this quandary, my dissertation proposal shook on its foundations—and I had not even tackled gender, my true object of study!

Our most dismal intellectual moments often turn out to be the most fruitful. Faced with the historical absence of such a key concept of contemporary culture, it began to dawn on me that this "void" should be a point of departure rather than despair. Whatever this technology thing was, it seemed to operate on a gender divide. Men, it seemed, were born possessing it (natural technophiles, in other words), while women were natural technophobes and born without it. The conclusion of this tale could have been that the word technology in my title merely paralleled the story of gender; and that whether talking about technology or gender, we were dealing with scholars' category of analysis and not necessarily a category used by historical actors.

On closer examination, however, it became evident that these categories are anything but equivalent. After all, in our daily lives the evocation of technology carries a distinctly different weight than "gender." It evokes a kind of power that nations, governments, businesses, and citizens routinely mobilize in their speech or eagerly spend money on to claim as their own.

Reading Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by the British literary scholar Raymond Williams,² I realized that technology had become a dominant keyword of American culture, one that carried a certain power. Williams's work also led me to understand that, as a term, technology had a tricky history—contested, long in coming, and with different discourse communities participating in its emergence. Most importantly, it pointed to the ways that words serve as weapons to frame the social realities in which some communities are invited to participate and others are not. The key quest thus became to establish the point at which contemporaries started to classify the world around them as "technical" and began to worship technology as a self-generating force. As the crucial player in this discursive shift, I pointed to the institutional economist Thorstein B. Veblen (1857–1929), who was America's major public...