The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939

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Starting around the year 1900, technology became a lively subject of debate among intellectuals, writiers, and other opinion leaders. The expansion of the machine into ever more areas of social and economic life had led to a need to interpret its meanings in a more comprehensive way than in the past. World War I and its aftermath shifted the terms of this ongoing debate by underlining both the potential dangers of technology and its centrality to modern life. This book examines the broad range of social and intellectual responses to technology in the first four decades of the 20th century, and suggests that these responses set the terms that contine to govern contemporary debates. Focusing on the broader contexts whithin which intellectual positions are formed, the book highlights the ways in which attitudes toward technology were shapted in a wider variety of national and organization settings. A common theme is that, in debating technology, people drew on their distinctive national symbols and cultural traditions. By emphasizing the interplay between debates on technology and the making of modernity, the book challenges standard historical accounts of the early 20th-century.

Author Bio

Mikael H rd is Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology. His books include The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology- Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (coedited with Andrew Jamison; MIT Press, 1998).