Technology Matters

Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters.Technology matters writes David Nye because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100000 years and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early ageas children we play with technological toys: trucks cars stoves telephones model railroads Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliancesBlackberries cell phones GPS navigation systems in our cars.We use technology to shape our world yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity or diversity? To create abundance or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should the market choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons or encapsulate us in artifice?These large questions may have no final answers yet but we need to wrestle with themto live them so that we may as Rilke puts it live along some distant day into the answers.