What Else is New?

[Dave Monroe]

What Else Is New?
How uses, not innovations, drive human technology.
by Steven Shapin

I'm writing in the kitchen, surrounded by technology....

[...]

... even the newest items contain design or functional elements from
the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878.

The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things,
even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without
them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we
customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it
seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a
new age into being. In "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global
History Since 1900" (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known
British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers
a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways
of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of
technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls
"the innovation-centric account" of technology. The book is a
provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual
Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the
door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at
predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist;
and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely
the same—indeed, a given technology's grip on our awareness is often
in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all,
Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with
invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through
use. A "history of technology-in-use," he writes, yields "a radically
different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and
innovation."

Consider the Second World War. When we think about the technologies
that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany's V-2
terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon's "A
screaming comes across the sky." Or the triumph of theoretical physics
and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the
things that capture the imagination, and yet Edgerton offers an
arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the
V-2 project "economically and militarily irrational." One historian
wrote that "more people died producing it than died from being hit by
it." Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred
million dollars on the project, "the destructive power of all the V-2s
produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a
city by the RAF." Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb
against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the
same money, "it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s,
one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other
military output, would have done to Allied fighting power."

So what forms of technology really pulled their weight in the war?
Horse-powered transport, for one....

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/14/070514crbo_books_shapin

Edgerton, David.  The Shock of the Old:
   Technology and Global History since 1900.
   New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryOther/HistoryofTechnology/?view=usa&ci=9780195322835