Hi all
I certainly do not count myself among those who oppose new technology. In that light, I offer the following observations:
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We believe that it is essential to view new technologies not so much as foreign to social or private life but as devices, when they gain a foothold, that help people continue to do what they have always done, but perhaps in new ways, whether faster, slower, or more efficiently.
The idea that people adapt technologies to their own uses is found in the sociologist Claude Fischer’s study of the telephone, which makes insightful arguments about how new technologies do not change everything, do not “determine the basic character of American life.”
“The telephone,” he writes, “did not radically alter American ways of life; rather, Americans used it to more vigorously pursue their characteristic ways of life.” Or as the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern writes more generally, “However transformative and innovative new technologies are, they work on what is already there, what already gives shape to people’s lives.”
Taylor, T. D., Katz, M., & Grajeda, T. (Eds.). (2012). Music, sound, and technology in America: A documentary history of early phonograph, cinema, and radio. Duke University Press.
posted by PLB
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