A User's Guide to the Age of Tech
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
A User's Guide to the Age of Tech
By (Author) Grant Wythoff
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
3rd September 2025
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Digital and information technologies: social and ethical aspects
Physical Properties
Hardback
176
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 15mm
249g
Description
How users experience and influence technological change-at a time when so much of that change feels out of our hands
Every day, we casually employ one of the most complex tools ever created, using it to read the news, plan our day, and connect with friends. In A User's Guide to the Age of Tech, Grant Wythoff investigates the process by which now-ubiquitous technologies like our phones become integrated into our lives, showing how the "gadget" stage-before devices are widely used-opens the door for users to co-create these technologies and adapt them toward unexpected ends.
In this elegant, approachable work, Wythoff offers a view of how users make new technology their own, subverting dominant power structures and imagining uses never intended by their creators. Rooted in a detailed look into the history of technique-focusing on the way we do things with tools, rather than the tools themselves-A User's Guide to the Age of Tech proceeds to complicate, and influence, discussion of subjects like the digital divide and AI.
Drawing on a range of sources, including novels, patents, and newspapers, Wythoff explores the vernacular philosophies that have emerged from users and their diverse, everyday practices, bringing down to earth the conversation about digital titans, away from the abstracted domains of server farms and algorithms. Lodging a passionate argument that we know ourselves better than the data brokers who appear to wield influence over our psyches, Wythoff invites readers (and tech users) to imagine their own digital technique, acknowledge their vast expertise, and see the immense value in it.
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Author Bio
Grant Wythoff directs graduate student programs at the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University. He is cofounder of the cooperative mesh network and digital equity organization Philly Community Wireless and is editor of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (Minnesota, 2016).
