"All that is solid melts into air": Historians of technology in the information revolution

Technology and Culture

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 641-665

  Williams, Rosalind ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0034345797     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2000.0189     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. The following units reported to the dean of students and undergraduate education: academic services (including the registrar's office), admissions, athletics, campus activities complex (including the office of campus dining), career services and preprofessional advising, counseling and support services, office of minority education, residential life and student life programs, student services information technology, and student financial services. I resigned my position as dean effective 1 July 2000 to return to teaching and research as an MIT faculty member.
2. John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 3.
3. Janet Snover, "Reengineering Is Over but Change Is Not," MIT Faculty Newsletter, 12 November 1999, 2, 6, 9.
4. Thomas Parke Hughes, quoting Perry Miller, Elting Morison symposium at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1 December 1995.
5. Joan Scott, as discussed in conversation with Philip Scranton, Detroit, 8 October 1999.
6. Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept," Social Research 64, no. 3 (fall 1997): 967, 994.
7. Marx, 967.
8. Marx, 978.
9. Marx, 968.
10. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith, introduction to Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), xii.
11. "Technologies are not neutral servants of whatever social or political order chooses to adopt them. Their adoption and operation often involves changes to that order - changes that are not automatic consequences of new technology but must themselves be engineered, often in the face of conflict and resistance." Donald MacKenzie, introduction to Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 14.
12. Lawrence K. Chang, "Multivariate Control of the Fire Hose" (unpublished mss., 3 July 1999), 169.
13. The phrase comes from Professor Woodie Flowers, in an MIT-Microsoft discussion about educational technology.
14. Data are from the McKinsey 1999 Engineering Alumni Career Decisions Survey (January 2000); copy in the author's possession. Among somewhat older MIT alumni/ae (1971-90), 25 percent aspire to be entrepreneurs while 22 percent want to be technical leaders. Among recent engineering graduates at a range of institutions (including but not limited to MIT), 24 percent want to be entrepreneurs and 29 percent want to be technical leaders.
15. Alex Roland, "What Hath Kranzberg Wrought? Or, Does the History of Technology Matter?," Technology and Culture 38 (July 1997): 712.
16. Robert C. Post, "Post Script," SHOT Newsletter no. 78, n.s. (January 1998), 2. See also SHOT Newsletter, no. 79, n.s. (April 1998), 1-3.
17. Robert C. Post, "Post Script," SHOT Newsletter no. 78, n.s. (January 1998), 2. See also SHOT Newsletter, no. 79, n.s. (April 1998), 1-3.
18. Roland, "What Hath Kranzberg Wrought?" and response to Henry Bjork, SHOT Newsletter, no. 82, n.s. (January 1999), 4.
19. Personal communication, 5 March 2000.
20. Michael L. Dertouzous, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York, 1997), 310-16.
21. Chang (n. 12 above), 170.
22. Personal communication at a meeting to review the Netherlands Graduate School of Science, Technology, and Modern Culture, Rolduc, the Netherlands, June 1999. See also David Hounshell, "Hughesian History of Technology and Chandlerian Business History: Parallels, Departures, and Critics," History of Technology 12 (1995): 212-13.
23. Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 281. A similar view is expressed by Pamela W. Laird in her response to Robert Post's call for comments on reasons for the marginality of the history of technology: "Accepting inevitability absolves citizens and consumers of responsibility. Inevitability is easy to live with in many ways, but the price is withdrawal and alienation. . . .our stories of technologies' contingent nature promise to raise questions in other people and stir citizens and consumers to rethink their alternatives in the face of apparently relentless and daunting multinational trends." SHOT Newsletter, no. 79, n.s. (April 1998), 3.
24. The term "bracketed" is used by Bijker in private correspondence (18 February 2000). See especially the development of the concept of technological determinism in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), and in Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, 279-88.
25. The term "bracketed" is used by Bijker in private correspondence (18 February 2000). See especially the development of the concept of technological determinism in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), and in Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, 279-88.
26. For example, quoted in Staudenmaier (n. 2 above), xvii.
27. See the stimulating discussion in Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York, 1999).
28. Leo Marx, review of In Context: History and the History of Technology, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, Technology and Culture 32 (April 1991): 394-5; Melvin Kranzberg and Leo Marx, "Communications," Technology and Culture 33 (April 1992): 406-7.
29. Leo Marx, review of In Context: History and the History of Technology, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, Technology and Culture 32 (April 1991): 394-5; Melvin Kranzberg and Leo Marx, "Communications," Technology and Culture 33 (April 1992): 406-7.