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To most people, technology has been reduced
to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak
of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and
CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built
World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology
the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling
the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western
thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character
but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws
on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture
to illuminate what technology has brought to society and
culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an
"ecotechnology" that works with, not against,
ecological systems.
From the "Creator" model of development
of the sixteenth century to the "big science"
of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry,
Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has
been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different
eras and the premises and problems it has offered. Thomas
Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology
could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment;
Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing
mechanization of American life.
Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have
existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea
that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions,
laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds,
and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built
World, he offers the highly engaging history of these
contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that
resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry;
it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
Thomas P. Hughes is the Mellon Professor
Emeritus in the Department of the History and Sociology
of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished
Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a member of
the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, Hughes has honorary doctorates from
Northwestern University and the Swedish Royal Institute
of Technology. A member of the Swedish Royal Academy of
Engineering Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering,
he is the editor of seven books and author of four, including
American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological
Enthusiasm, 1870-1970, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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