Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920568
Kaushik Roy
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> by Paul Lockhart <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kaushik Roy (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> By Paul Lockhart. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. xii + 624. <p>Gunpowder changed the course of warfare and, ipso facto, global history. The advocates of the Military Revolution thesis (starting from Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker's <em>The Military Revolution</em>, 1988) argue along this line. Even if one challenges this "big" assertion, there is no denying that gunpowder weaponries definitely constitute a break with the medieval past. There are some sophisticated global surveys about the history of the interrelationship between the changing contours of war and the evolution of military technology (for instance, Martin van Creveld's <em>Technology and War</em>, 1989; Trevor N. Dupuy's <em>The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare</em>, 1990; and Jeremy Black's <em>War and Technology</em>, 2013, among others). However, such broad-range accounts provide few details about how the different weapons worked. On the other hand, we have monographs detailing the characteristics of particular weapon systems like AK-47s, Tiger tanks, etc. Such microstudies with a wealth of technical information interest only collectors of weapons and military buffs. Interested educated readers and historians are thus left hanging between broad-brush treatments of weapon systems at one pole and microstudies of specific weapons at the other.</p> <p>In the voluminous work under review, Paul Lockhart, professor of history at Wright State University, fills this vacuum. He turns the focus on the technicalities of the weapons that made up the era of gunpowder warfare during the last 600 years. He begins in circa 1400 and ends with the end of the Cold War. To avoid the barrage of criticisms that Parker and W. H. McNeill (for his <em>The Pursuit of Power</em>, 1982) received, Lockhart limits his gaze to Western Europe and the United States. Rightly he says that the 1980s marked the end of the dominance of gunpowder weapons and the 1990s saw the beginning of the Information Revolution, which resulted in the primacy of networking of information systems, with firepower taking a secondary role in war. <strong>[End Page 431]</strong></p> <p>Lots of information regarding the arms and munitions used in the three domains (air, land, and sea) is pounded on the readers analytically and succinctly. Lockhart tells us concisely about the characteristics of the important weapons, how they worked, and why they were being replaced by other weapon systems. We get a clear idea of a matchlock and why it was replaced by a musket in the sixteenth century, the difference between breechloaders and muzzleloaders, the shift from black powder to smokeless powder toward the end of the nineteenth century, the transition from coal to oil engines at the beginning of the twentieth cen
评论者 Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart Kaushik Roy (bio) Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare By Paul Lockhart.纽约：Basic Books, 2021.第 xii + 624 页。火药改变了战争的进程，当然也改变了全球历史。军事革命论（始于迈克尔-罗伯茨和杰弗里-帕克的著作《军事革命》，1988 年）的倡导者都是这样论证的。即使有人对这一 "重大 "论断提出质疑，但不可否认的是，火药武器绝对是对中世纪过去的一种突破。关于战争轮廓的变化与军事技术演变之间相互关系的历史，有一些复杂的全球性研究（例如，马丁-范-克雷弗尔德的《技术与战争》，1989 年；特雷弗-N-杜普伊的《武器与战争的演变》，1990 年；杰里米-布莱克的《战争与技术》，2013 年等）。然而，这些大范围的描述几乎没有提供关于不同武器如何发挥作用的细节。另一方面，我们也有专著详细介绍 AK-47 冲锋枪、虎式坦克等特定武器系统的特点。只有武器收藏家和军事迷才会对这些技术信息丰富的微观研究感兴趣。因此，有兴趣的知识型读者和历史学家只能在对武器系统的粗略论述和对具体武器的微观研究之间徘徊。莱特州立大学历史学教授保罗-洛克哈特（Paul Lockhart）的这部巨著填补了这一空白。他将重点转向了过去 600 年间火药战争时代的武器技术。他从大约 1400 年开始，到冷战结束为止。为了避免帕克和麦克尼尔（W. H. McNeill，代表作《追求力量》，1982 年出版）受到的大量批评，洛克哈特将目光局限于西欧和美国。他正确地指出，20 世纪 80 年代标志着火药武器主导地位的终结，而 20 世纪 90 年代则是信息革命的开端，信息革命的结果是信息系统的网络化占据主导地位，火力在战争中处于次要地位。[第 431 页尾）有关海、陆、空三大领域所使用的武器弹药的大量信息，简明扼要地向读者进行了分析。洛克哈特简明扼要地告诉我们重要武器的特点、工作原理以及被其他武器系统取代的原因。我们可以清楚地了解火柴枪，以及为什么它在 16 世纪会被火枪取代；后膛枪和枪口枪的区别；19 世纪末从黑火药到无烟火药的转变；20 世纪初从煤炭发动机到石油发动机的转变；栓动步枪和突击步枪的区别，等等。洛克哈特展示了武器系统的发展与战术变革之间的相互作用，功不可没。例如，火枪催生了线性战争，而步枪则促使小兵的出现。除了告诉我们不同的武器系统如何以及为何在特定时期占据主导地位，洛克哈特还提出了一个宏观论点。火力》一书令人信服地指出，拥有强大制造基础和大量标准质量武器的国家，在与部署数量有限的尖端武器的强国的战争中获胜。洛克哈特的分析比保罗-肯尼迪（Paul Kennedy）在《大国的兴衰》（The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers，1987 年）一书中直截了当的论证更为细致，后者认为拥有最大经济基础的国家会取得胜利。理查德-奥弗里（Richard Overy）在《盟军为何获胜》（1995 年）一书中对第二次世界大战进行的案例研究表明，尽管纳粹部署了质量上乘的武器系统，但由于数量上的优势，他们还是被盟军打败了。洛克哈特将这一模式延伸到了过去 600 年的西方历史。有人可能会批评《火力》带有软技术决定论的味道。洛克哈特没有考虑到社会和文化风俗对火药武器升级及其部署的影响。但对于受过教育的非专业读者以及认真研究军事技术的学生来说，这本寓教于乐的珍贵书籍是必读之书。[卡乌什克-罗伊 卡乌什克-罗伊是贾达夫普尔大学历史系古鲁-纳纳克讲座教授...
{"title":"Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart (review)","authors":"Kaushik Roy","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920568","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> by Paul Lockhart <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kaushik Roy (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare</em> By Paul Lockhart. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. xii + 624. <p>Gunpowder changed the course of warfare and, ipso facto, global history. The advocates of the Military Revolution thesis (starting from Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker's <em>The Military Revolution</em>, 1988) argue along this line. Even if one challenges this \"big\" assertion, there is no denying that gunpowder weaponries definitely constitute a break with the medieval past. There are some sophisticated global surveys about the history of the interrelationship between the changing contours of war and the evolution of military technology (for instance, Martin van Creveld's <em>Technology and War</em>, 1989; Trevor N. Dupuy's <em>The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare</em>, 1990; and Jeremy Black's <em>War and Technology</em>, 2013, among others). However, such broad-range accounts provide few details about how the different weapons worked. On the other hand, we have monographs detailing the characteristics of particular weapon systems like AK-47s, Tiger tanks, etc. Such microstudies with a wealth of technical information interest only collectors of weapons and military buffs. Interested educated readers and historians are thus left hanging between broad-brush treatments of weapon systems at one pole and microstudies of specific weapons at the other.</p> <p>In the voluminous work under review, Paul Lockhart, professor of history at Wright State University, fills this vacuum. He turns the focus on the technicalities of the weapons that made up the era of gunpowder warfare during the last 600 years. He begins in circa 1400 and ends with the end of the Cold War. To avoid the barrage of criticisms that Parker and W. H. McNeill (for his <em>The Pursuit of Power</em>, 1982) received, Lockhart limits his gaze to Western Europe and the United States. Rightly he says that the 1980s marked the end of the dominance of gunpowder weapons and the 1990s saw the beginning of the Information Revolution, which resulted in the primacy of networking of information systems, with firepower taking a secondary role in war. <strong>[End Page 431]</strong></p> <p>Lots of information regarding the arms and munitions used in the three domains (air, land, and sea) is pounded on the readers analytically and succinctly. Lockhart tells us concisely about the characteristics of the important weapons, how they worked, and why they were being replaced by other weapon systems. We get a clear idea of a matchlock and why it was replaced by a musket in the sixteenth century, the difference between breechloaders and muzzleloaders, the shift from black powder to smokeless powder toward the end of the nineteenth century, the transition from coal to oil engines at the beginning of the twentieth cen","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920527
Rachel Maines
abstract:
The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barbie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supposed "World Map" in one scene. For nations in and around the South China Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claims to territorial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerwig's film is a runaway success, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dollars and counting.
{"title":"Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie","authors":"Rachel Maines","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920527","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie <i>Barbie</i> is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supposed \"World Map\" in one scene. For nations in and around the South China Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claims to territorial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerwig's film is a runaway success, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dollars and counting.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920525
Ruth Oldenziel
<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Public History:<span>Introducing Barbenheimer</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ruth Oldenziel </li> </ul> <p>The summer of 2023 marked the surprising blockbuster season of two films: Christopher Nolan's <em>Oppenheimer</em>, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, and Greta Gerwig's <em>Barbie</em>, a fantasy comedy about the American doll who conquered the world. Released on the same day, July 21, the cultural phenomenon also created a portmanteau of the films' titles. The portmanteau <em>Barbenheimer</em> was first coined as a joke to place the two films in the same analytical frame precisely because they seemed like such polar opposites—one about a serious and recognized scientific subject, the other about a frivolous fashion doll. The two films, now joined at the hip, provoked much public comment. <em>Technology and Culture</em> invited two prominent historians of technology to offer their perspectives on the public history point of view of technology.</p> <p>In Aimee Slaughter's essay on <em>Oppenheimer</em>, she critiques the film for its conspicuous omission of crucial perspectives, noting the absence of the perspective of the people of New Mexico, whose land was occupied during the Manhattan Project and who have been affected by its aftermath ever since, as well as the oversight of the contributions of women scientists during the Manhattan Project. Equally important is her critique of the film's failure to address the profound suffering of the Japanese people in Hiroshima as a result of the atomic bombing, weaving her personal and local reception of the film into her reading of it.</p> <p>Nolan's <em>Oppenheimer</em>, according to Slaughter, is instead "in awe of physics and the power it can bestow." The film is less interested in science than in power, pitting Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director, against Lewis Strauss, a man who worked for the U.S. military, managing and rewarding munitions production, and who went on to become a major figure in nuclear weapons development, energy policy, and U.S. nuclear power after the war. She finds the figure of Strauss particularly noteworthy as the counterpoint to Oppenheimer "because it highlights the relationship between scientists and government, which is often ignored in popular images of science." Moreover, <strong>[End Page 315]</strong> "federal and military involvement in science is not portrayed in a particularly positive light."<sup>1</sup></p> <p>At the same time, <em>Oppenheimer</em> offers an all-too-familiar public image of science and technology as the "individualized work of masculine genius," despite scholarship to the contrary.<sup>2</sup> Barbie is Oppenheimer's photographic negative. Since the 1950s, Barbie has represented a universe for girls in which the serious business is to catch a husband, raise a family with him, and thriftily outfit the growing children—with the pr
{"title":"Public History: Introducing Barbenheimer","authors":"Ruth Oldenziel","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920525","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Public History:<span>Introducing Barbenheimer</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ruth Oldenziel </li> </ul> <p>The summer of 2023 marked the surprising blockbuster season of two films: Christopher Nolan's <em>Oppenheimer</em>, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, and Greta Gerwig's <em>Barbie</em>, a fantasy comedy about the American doll who conquered the world. Released on the same day, July 21, the cultural phenomenon also created a portmanteau of the films' titles. The portmanteau <em>Barbenheimer</em> was first coined as a joke to place the two films in the same analytical frame precisely because they seemed like such polar opposites—one about a serious and recognized scientific subject, the other about a frivolous fashion doll. The two films, now joined at the hip, provoked much public comment. <em>Technology and Culture</em> invited two prominent historians of technology to offer their perspectives on the public history point of view of technology.</p> <p>In Aimee Slaughter's essay on <em>Oppenheimer</em>, she critiques the film for its conspicuous omission of crucial perspectives, noting the absence of the perspective of the people of New Mexico, whose land was occupied during the Manhattan Project and who have been affected by its aftermath ever since, as well as the oversight of the contributions of women scientists during the Manhattan Project. Equally important is her critique of the film's failure to address the profound suffering of the Japanese people in Hiroshima as a result of the atomic bombing, weaving her personal and local reception of the film into her reading of it.</p> <p>Nolan's <em>Oppenheimer</em>, according to Slaughter, is instead \"in awe of physics and the power it can bestow.\" The film is less interested in science than in power, pitting Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director, against Lewis Strauss, a man who worked for the U.S. military, managing and rewarding munitions production, and who went on to become a major figure in nuclear weapons development, energy policy, and U.S. nuclear power after the war. She finds the figure of Strauss particularly noteworthy as the counterpoint to Oppenheimer \"because it highlights the relationship between scientists and government, which is often ignored in popular images of science.\" Moreover, <strong>[End Page 315]</strong> \"federal and military involvement in science is not portrayed in a particularly positive light.\"<sup>1</sup></p> <p>At the same time, <em>Oppenheimer</em> offers an all-too-familiar public image of science and technology as the \"individualized work of masculine genius,\" despite scholarship to the contrary.<sup>2</sup> Barbie is Oppenheimer's photographic negative. Since the 1950s, Barbie has represented a universe for girls in which the serious business is to catch a husband, raise a family with him, and thriftily outfit the growing children—with the pr","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920563
Sara Tanderup Linkis
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of "Books That Sing"</em> by Justin St. Clair <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sara Tanderup Linkis (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of "Books That Sing"</em> By Justin St. Clair. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 182. <p>The aspect of sound has become increasingly relevant to consider in studies of books and literature as the world of books is adjusting to a "turn towards audio." Audiobooks have become more popular than ever before, and consequently we see increasing experimentation with sound in books: books that include music and sound effects are becoming mainstream, and new hybrid formats are emerging. This development has resulted in new scholarly attention toward an otherwise overlooked perspective, namely the dynamics between sound and text, or more specifically, between books and music.</p> <p>The timing thus seems perfect for Justin St. Clair's <em>Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age</em>. While most research in the field centers on audiobooks (e.g., Matthew Rubery, Iben Have, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen), St. Clair focuses on the subgenre of soundtracked books, defined as "a book (a physical print publication, or its digital analogue) for which a musical soundtrack has been produced" (p. 1). The result is a specific hybridity, "the visuality of narrative print media coupled with the aurality of musical sound recordings" (p. 1), which makes the form interesting, according to St. Clair. Departing from Murray Schafer's much-debated notion of "schizo" analysis, he introduces the concept of "schizotemporality," signifying a split between the readtime of the text and the runtime of the musical recording, and he demonstrates how this aspect defines uses of soundtracked books throughout the last century.</p> <p>Focusing on the subgenre results in what St. Clair calls an "idiosyncratic trip through a hundred years of media history" (p. 1). While the project might seem idiosyncratic, with a selection of more or less eccentric case studies from children's "Bubble Books" to New Age sci-fi novels, it does result in a convincing piece of media history, presenting a development from educational to literary uses of the sound-text combination. The former tendency is demonstrated in case studies of the Bubble Books series, early twentieth-century children's books published with miniature records (ch. 1), and a study of musical ethnographies and midcentury exotica, focusing on the Columbia Legacy Collection (1954–72; ch. 2). Combining close readings with rich contextualizations, St. Clair demonstrates how these examples reflect uses <strong>[End Page 422]</strong> of the singing book to illustrate established myths and conventions: retelling fairytales in the case of the Bubble Books and confirming ethnic stereotypes in the Legacy Collection
评论者 从原声时代到数字时代的原声图书：Sara Tanderup Linkis (bio) Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of "Books That Sing" by Justin St：一个世纪的 "歌唱之书"》 作者：贾斯汀-圣克莱尔。阿宾顿：Routledge, 2022.Pp.182.随着图书世界正在适应 "向音频的转变"，在图书和文学研究中考虑声音问题变得越来越重要。有声读物比以往任何时候都更受欢迎，因此我们看到在书籍中越来越多地尝试声音：包含音乐和音效的书籍正在成为主流，新的混合格式正在出现。这一发展导致学术界开始关注一个原本被忽视的视角，即声音与文字之间的动态关系，或者更具体地说，书籍与音乐之间的动态关系。因此，贾斯汀-圣克莱尔（Justin St. Clair）的《从声学时代到数字时代的音轨图书》一书的出版时机似乎恰到好处。该领域的大多数研究都集中在有声读物上（如马修-鲁贝里、伊本-哈夫和比尔吉特-斯托加德-佩德森），而圣克莱尔则专注于 "配乐图书 "这一子类型，其定义为 "制作了配乐的图书（实体印刷出版物或其数字类似物）"（第 1 页）。圣克莱尔认为，"叙事性印刷媒体的视觉性与音乐录音的听觉性相结合"（第 1 页），产生了一种特殊的混合性，使这种形式变得有趣。他从默里-舍费尔（Murray Schafer）备受争议的 "分裂 "分析概念出发，引入了 "分裂时空 "的概念，即文本的阅读时间与音乐录音的播放时间之间的分裂，并展示了这一方面是如何定义上个世纪有声读物的用途的。St. Clair 称这是一次 "穿越百年媒体史的特异之旅"（第 1 页）。从儿童 "泡泡书 "到新纪元科幻小说，该项目选取的案例或多或少有些古怪，但它确实是一部令人信服的媒体史，展示了声音-文字组合从教育到文学用途的发展。前者体现在对 "泡泡书 "系列--20 世纪早期用微型唱片出版的儿童读物（第 1 章）--的案例研究中，后者则体现在对音乐民族志和中世纪外来音乐的研究中，重点是哥伦比亚遗产收藏（1954-72 年；第 2 章）。圣克莱尔将细读与丰富的上下文相结合，展示了这些例子如何反映了歌唱书如何被用来说明既定的神话和惯例：在《泡泡书》中重述童话故事，在《遗产集》中证实种族成见。本书的后半部分转向文学实验，重点是迈克尔-奈史密斯的《监狱》（1974 年）、L-罗恩-哈伯德的《地球战场》（1982 年）和乌苏拉-K-勒奎恩的《常回家看看》（1985 年；第 3 章）。作为后现代文学的专家，St. Clair 在此指出了配乐小说的 "时间分裂性 "与 "当代文化中出现的一系列认识论危机 "之间的联系（第 10 页）。文学性的转向与参与性的转向联系在一起：让读者参与诠释声音与文本的关系，从而摆脱仅用于说明和教育的形式。这种趋势在圣克莱尔转向数字时代时达到了顶峰，他特别关注马克-Z-达尼耶夫斯基的小说《叶之屋》（House of Leaves，2000 年），这部小说被宣布为有声小说的 "最高标志"（第 10 页）。这里的重点是围绕这部作品的网络社区，以及它们在阐释这部作品与其 "原声带"--专辑《Haunted by Poe》--的关系时所发挥的作用。分析显示出对数字时代参与机会的强烈乐观态度。圣克莱尔确实谈到了其他方面，包括试图利用配乐图书的尝试，如他在后记中对新创公司 BookTrack（2011 年）的讨论，该公司为电子书制作同步配乐；不过，他的重点显然是文学实验和参与性文化的潜力。虽然这种乐观态度值得商榷，但《从声学时代到数字时代的原声带图书》确实对一个利基市场进行了有力的分析...
{"title":"Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of \"Books That Sing\" by Justin St. Clair (review)","authors":"Sara Tanderup Linkis","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920563","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of \"Books That Sing\"</em> by Justin St. Clair <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sara Tanderup Linkis (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of \"Books That Sing\"</em> By Justin St. Clair. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 182. <p>The aspect of sound has become increasingly relevant to consider in studies of books and literature as the world of books is adjusting to a \"turn towards audio.\" Audiobooks have become more popular than ever before, and consequently we see increasing experimentation with sound in books: books that include music and sound effects are becoming mainstream, and new hybrid formats are emerging. This development has resulted in new scholarly attention toward an otherwise overlooked perspective, namely the dynamics between sound and text, or more specifically, between books and music.</p> <p>The timing thus seems perfect for Justin St. Clair's <em>Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age</em>. While most research in the field centers on audiobooks (e.g., Matthew Rubery, Iben Have, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen), St. Clair focuses on the subgenre of soundtracked books, defined as \"a book (a physical print publication, or its digital analogue) for which a musical soundtrack has been produced\" (p. 1). The result is a specific hybridity, \"the visuality of narrative print media coupled with the aurality of musical sound recordings\" (p. 1), which makes the form interesting, according to St. Clair. Departing from Murray Schafer's much-debated notion of \"schizo\" analysis, he introduces the concept of \"schizotemporality,\" signifying a split between the readtime of the text and the runtime of the musical recording, and he demonstrates how this aspect defines uses of soundtracked books throughout the last century.</p> <p>Focusing on the subgenre results in what St. Clair calls an \"idiosyncratic trip through a hundred years of media history\" (p. 1). While the project might seem idiosyncratic, with a selection of more or less eccentric case studies from children's \"Bubble Books\" to New Age sci-fi novels, it does result in a convincing piece of media history, presenting a development from educational to literary uses of the sound-text combination. The former tendency is demonstrated in case studies of the Bubble Books series, early twentieth-century children's books published with miniature records (ch. 1), and a study of musical ethnographies and midcentury exotica, focusing on the Columbia Legacy Collection (1954–72; ch. 2). Combining close readings with rich contextualizations, St. Clair demonstrates how these examples reflect uses <strong>[End Page 422]</strong> of the singing book to illustrate established myths and conventions: retelling fairytales in the case of the Bubble Books and confirming ethnic stereotypes in the Legacy Collection","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920564
W. B. Worthen
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre</em> by Philip Butterworth <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> W. B. Worthen (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre</em> By Philip Butterworth and edited by Peter Harrop. London: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xiv + 346. <p>Philip Butterworth's illuminating <em>Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic</em>, a collection of essays largely published since the 1990s, casts an attentive eye to the handmade technologies supporting a crucial aspect of medieval English culture: the vivid strain of artistic and social performances—annual religious cycle pageants, civic and royal spectacles—animating city life, and suggestively, their descendants in modern restorations of medieval drama. For historians of technology, Butterworth offers detailed accounts of the making of specific tools, of the purveyors of theatrical technology (props, costumes, fire), and of the intertwining of representational technologies—especially the pageant wagon or carriage—with medieval social life. The opening essay treats the 1433 York Mercers' Indenture, discovered in 1971, which contracted craftsmen to build one of the most important wagons in the York Corpus Christi cycle, that series of forty-eight Biblical narratives tracing history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, performed processually at a series of stations throughout the city on a single day (the Feast of Corpus Christi, late spring). Each was financed by a trade guild: the wealthy Mercers were awarded the climactic finale of the forty-eight pageants, <em>Domesday</em>. "Item, for bynding of a pair of whelys": Butterworth traces the then-short history of spoked wheels in England and the necessary practice of binding the rim with a thin band of iron. This process, though, suggests the importance of the Mercers and of what was called "the Play of Corpus Christi," as it required an exemption from a city ordinance banning iron-bound wheels as damaging to the pavement. Similarly, describing the complex axle structure and steering mechanism, and the indenture's mention of instruments used in storing the disassembled wagon, Butterworth turns to Chester, where a sixteenth-century collapsible wagon provides insight into the ways the Chester guilds—the Coopers and the Smiths—may have stored and maintained their wagons for their single yearly use. Butterworth gives similarly evocative attention to the making, supply, and use of props, the staging of hellmouths and hell fire, pyrotechnics, and to a signal variety of tricks and magic acts.</p> <p>The annual staging of the Corpus Christi pageants, as well as the various civil (the Lord Mayor), aristocratic, and royal progresses and pageants, involved construction (of wagons or temporary stages, as for the entry of Elizabeth Woodville into Norwich in 1469); the
评论者 Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre by Philip Butterworth W. B. Worthen (bio) Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre By Philip Butterworth and edited by Peter Harrop.伦敦：Routledge, 2022。第 xiv + 346 页。菲利普-巴特沃斯富有启发性的《舞台、表演、烟火与魔术》是一本论文集，主要收录了自 20 世纪 90 年代以来发表的文章，作者对支持中世纪英国文化一个重要方面的手工制作技术给予了关注：生动的艺术和社会表演--一年一度的宗教庆典、市民和皇家盛会--使城市生活充满活力，令人深思的是，这些表演在中世纪戏剧的现代复原中也得到了传承。对于技术史学家，巴特沃斯详细介绍了特定工具的制作、戏剧技术（道具、服装、火）的提供者，以及表现技术（尤其是庆典马车或马车）与中世纪社会生活的交织。开篇文章论述了 1971 年发现的 1433 年约克商人契约，该契约委托工匠建造约克基督圣体节系列中最重要的马车之一，该系列由四十八个圣经故事组成，追溯了从创世到最后审判的历史，在同一天（基督圣体节，春末）在全城的一系列站点进行演出。每场演出都由一个行业公会出资：富有的商人们获得了四十八场盛会的压轴戏--"多米日"。"物品，一对麦穗的抵押"：巴特沃斯追溯了当时英格兰辐条车轮的短暂历史，以及用细铁带捆绑轮辋的必要做法。不过，这一工艺表明了墨客和所谓的 "基督圣体游戏 "的重要性，因为它要求豁免禁止铁制车轮损坏路面的城市法令。同样，在描述了复杂的车轴结构和转向装置以及契约中提到的用于存放拆卸马车的工具后，巴特沃斯将目光转向了切斯特，在那里，一辆 16 世纪的可折叠马车让人了解到切斯特行会--库珀家族和史密斯家族--可能是如何存放和维护他们的马车以供每年使用的。巴特沃斯还对道具的制作、供应和使用、地狱之门和地狱之火的表演、烟火以及各种技巧和魔术表演给予了同样令人回味的关注。每年举行的基督圣体庆典以及各种民间（市长大人）、贵族和皇室的游行和庆典，都需要建造（马车或临时舞台，如 1469 年伊丽莎白-伍德维尔进入诺威奇时）；支付工匠、裁缝、表演者和供应商的费用；特效；以及经常与市政官员进行谈判。庆典循环的 "车站 "设在哪里--比如说，这是一个公众相当感兴趣的问题 [第424页完]？马车如何在狭窄的街道上行驶？能否拆掉突出的店角，以方便马车转弯？(是的。）在表演之前，街道上的小贩要搬走，突出的招牌要摘下，"粪便、其他污物和讨厌的东西、箱子、空罐子和其他物品，躺在街道和小巷里"，如 1357 年伦敦的一份公告所说，都要清理干净，这表明人们认为这种表演是为了提高 "外人和外国人眼中的城市声誉"（第 69-70 页）。通过今天的演出，我们可以了解到什么，尤其是关于其技术设备的有效性？巴特沃斯直接参与了戏剧和戏剧教学法的一个新兴分支：利用表演--无论是现代表演还是通过对早期（古希腊、莎士比亚等）戏剧技术的知情重建--作为教学和研究的手段。他在关于约克受难记表演中演员与观众互动的文章中提到了 "重演中世纪戏剧是否还有其他价值？巴特沃斯认为，将重建的表演作为 "研究"，需要仔细 "阐明特定表演的目的和目标......"（第 330 页）。
{"title":"Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre by Philip Butterworth (review)","authors":"W. B. Worthen","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920564","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre</em> by Philip Butterworth <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> W. B. Worthen (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre</em> By Philip Butterworth and edited by Peter Harrop. London: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xiv + 346. <p>Philip Butterworth's illuminating <em>Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic</em>, a collection of essays largely published since the 1990s, casts an attentive eye to the handmade technologies supporting a crucial aspect of medieval English culture: the vivid strain of artistic and social performances—annual religious cycle pageants, civic and royal spectacles—animating city life, and suggestively, their descendants in modern restorations of medieval drama. For historians of technology, Butterworth offers detailed accounts of the making of specific tools, of the purveyors of theatrical technology (props, costumes, fire), and of the intertwining of representational technologies—especially the pageant wagon or carriage—with medieval social life. The opening essay treats the 1433 York Mercers' Indenture, discovered in 1971, which contracted craftsmen to build one of the most important wagons in the York Corpus Christi cycle, that series of forty-eight Biblical narratives tracing history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, performed processually at a series of stations throughout the city on a single day (the Feast of Corpus Christi, late spring). Each was financed by a trade guild: the wealthy Mercers were awarded the climactic finale of the forty-eight pageants, <em>Domesday</em>. \"Item, for bynding of a pair of whelys\": Butterworth traces the then-short history of spoked wheels in England and the necessary practice of binding the rim with a thin band of iron. This process, though, suggests the importance of the Mercers and of what was called \"the Play of Corpus Christi,\" as it required an exemption from a city ordinance banning iron-bound wheels as damaging to the pavement. Similarly, describing the complex axle structure and steering mechanism, and the indenture's mention of instruments used in storing the disassembled wagon, Butterworth turns to Chester, where a sixteenth-century collapsible wagon provides insight into the ways the Chester guilds—the Coopers and the Smiths—may have stored and maintained their wagons for their single yearly use. Butterworth gives similarly evocative attention to the making, supply, and use of props, the staging of hellmouths and hell fire, pyrotechnics, and to a signal variety of tricks and magic acts.</p> <p>The annual staging of the Corpus Christi pageants, as well as the various civil (the Lord Mayor), aristocratic, and royal progresses and pageants, involved construction (of wagons or temporary stages, as for the entry of Elizabeth Woodville into Norwich in 1469); the ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"81 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920540
Abby Spinak
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification</em> by Richard F. Hirsh <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Abby Spinak (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification</em> By Richard F. Hirsh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 400. <p>It's hard to imagine being afraid of a refrigerator, but if your neighbor had died from the chemical leaks that plagued early models, you likely would have been. Even so, you might have been optimistic about crop yields from electrically stimulated soil. Or your time might have been better spent "lobbying for better roads [over] electric lines" (p. 249). As Richard Hirsh cautions, histories of early electrification programs "should not reflect today's appreciation of electricity but rather the attitudes of people living almost a century ago" (p. 252).</p> <p><em>Powering American Farms</em> is an explicitly revisionist history that sheds new light on private power companies' contributions to rural electrification in the United States. Hirsh rightly notes that energy historians have privileged the institutional narratives of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) <strong>[End Page 378]</strong> and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—New Deal–era federal projects that spurred rapid power extension out to (as the story goes) anxiously waiting ruralites. In this narrative, federal agencies stepped in after frustrating negotiations with power companies left rural America in the dark, artificially depressing the countryside and spurring urban migration.</p> <p>By contrast, Hirsh shows, the REA/TVA built on years of study by private utility coalitions. Private experiments extending power to sparsely populated communities and using electricity on farms were especially impressive, Hirsh argues, given the arm's-length interest in electricity at the time. Hirsh doesn't excuse the "morally and legally ambiguous tactics" that have provided fodder for more critical histories of the power industry (p. 227). But, he argues, these narratives obscure the work that private companies did prior to—as well as alongside—government programs. <em>Powering American Farms</em> thus adds a utility-centered perspective to a small but growing literature that contests the common narrative of the REA/TVA as grassroots electric democracy and instead takes them seriously as federal bureaucracies with shifting national agendas (e.g., David Nye, <em>Electrifying America</em>, 1990; Leah Glaser, <em>Electrifying the Rural American West</em>, 2009; Brent Cebul, "Creative Competition," 2018).</p> <p>Hirsh has been writing about the electricity industry for decades, and his deep familiarity with American electrification archives, both public and private, shines bright in this latest book: in a wealth of new stories about farmers' and agricultural engineers' experiments with energy sources and prac
{"title":"Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification by Richard F. Hirsh (review)","authors":"Abby Spinak","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920540","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification</em> by Richard F. Hirsh <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Abby Spinak (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification</em> By Richard F. Hirsh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 400. <p>It's hard to imagine being afraid of a refrigerator, but if your neighbor had died from the chemical leaks that plagued early models, you likely would have been. Even so, you might have been optimistic about crop yields from electrically stimulated soil. Or your time might have been better spent \"lobbying for better roads [over] electric lines\" (p. 249). As Richard Hirsh cautions, histories of early electrification programs \"should not reflect today's appreciation of electricity but rather the attitudes of people living almost a century ago\" (p. 252).</p> <p><em>Powering American Farms</em> is an explicitly revisionist history that sheds new light on private power companies' contributions to rural electrification in the United States. Hirsh rightly notes that energy historians have privileged the institutional narratives of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) <strong>[End Page 378]</strong> and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—New Deal–era federal projects that spurred rapid power extension out to (as the story goes) anxiously waiting ruralites. In this narrative, federal agencies stepped in after frustrating negotiations with power companies left rural America in the dark, artificially depressing the countryside and spurring urban migration.</p> <p>By contrast, Hirsh shows, the REA/TVA built on years of study by private utility coalitions. Private experiments extending power to sparsely populated communities and using electricity on farms were especially impressive, Hirsh argues, given the arm's-length interest in electricity at the time. Hirsh doesn't excuse the \"morally and legally ambiguous tactics\" that have provided fodder for more critical histories of the power industry (p. 227). But, he argues, these narratives obscure the work that private companies did prior to—as well as alongside—government programs. <em>Powering American Farms</em> thus adds a utility-centered perspective to a small but growing literature that contests the common narrative of the REA/TVA as grassroots electric democracy and instead takes them seriously as federal bureaucracies with shifting national agendas (e.g., David Nye, <em>Electrifying America</em>, 1990; Leah Glaser, <em>Electrifying the Rural American West</em>, 2009; Brent Cebul, \"Creative Competition,\" 2018).</p> <p>Hirsh has been writing about the electricity industry for decades, and his deep familiarity with American electrification archives, both public and private, shines bright in this latest book: in a wealth of new stories about farmers' and agricultural engineers' experiments with energy sources and prac","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"241 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920562
Katie Mackinnon
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992</em> by Tilman Baumgärtel <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Katie Mackinnon (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992</em> By Tilman Baumgärtel with Julien Weinert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 234. <p><em>Van Gogh TV's "Piazza Virtuale"</em> provides a theoretical and historical framework for the development of <em>Piazza virtuale</em>, an artist-run interactive television program that broadcast for one hundred days in the summer of 1992 and was organized by the artist group Van Gogh TV.</p> <p>Baumgärtel suggests that "Van Gogh TV's <em>Piazza virtuale</em> inhabits its own unique space in the pre-history of internet culture, virtual communities and internet art" (p. 13), which he demonstrates through a discussion of practices and policies that seem to preemptively mimic the same issues, policies, and debates in contemporary social media platforms.</p> <p>During the show, audience members would call in by phone, fax, or computer chat—embodying Brecht's "radio theorie" of consumers becoming producers of media content. The artists describe this as an attempt to introduce performance art with audience participation into the mass medium of television. However, maintaining an ethos of "unhindered free expression" on the open call-in line was challenged when a viewer insulted German chancellor Helmut Kohl live on air. The station then appointed Katrin Brinkmann, a freelancer in a "low-level" position, who became responsible for moderating calls and kicking people off the line should they express "obscenities or political propaganda."</p> <p>Baumgärtel briefly compares Brinkmann's role and that of social media content moderation policies, which social media companies have been grappling with for over a decade. He similarly draws parallels to insidious workplace practices and corporate relationships in creative cultural industries, which were also present at Van Gogh TV, and draws attention to the ways in which camaraderie and creative passion seem to foster unjust labor <strong>[End Page 420]</strong> conditions, such as long hours, hot rooms with minimal breaks, hierarchies of inequity, and gender-based discrimination. He quotes one of the founders, who states, "The people we had were like racehorses. We always had to whip them to keep them running" (p. 106).</p> <p>Through these admissions, we can come to understand that, rather than providing much evidence that they invented social media, there was a culture present in the Federal Republic of Germany, as there was elsewhere, in which ideals of democracy and participation from the 1970s onward inspired the first steps into the newly discovered "cyberspace." This discovery became enmeshed in politics of masculinist logics of creative freedom and control.</p> <p>Other recent monographs h
{"title":"Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992 by Tilman Baumgärtel (review)","authors":"Katie Mackinnon","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920562","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992</em> by Tilman Baumgärtel <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Katie Mackinnon (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\": The Invention of Social Media at documenta IX in 1992</em> By Tilman Baumgärtel with Julien Weinert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 234. <p><em>Van Gogh TV's \"Piazza Virtuale\"</em> provides a theoretical and historical framework for the development of <em>Piazza virtuale</em>, an artist-run interactive television program that broadcast for one hundred days in the summer of 1992 and was organized by the artist group Van Gogh TV.</p> <p>Baumgärtel suggests that \"Van Gogh TV's <em>Piazza virtuale</em> inhabits its own unique space in the pre-history of internet culture, virtual communities and internet art\" (p. 13), which he demonstrates through a discussion of practices and policies that seem to preemptively mimic the same issues, policies, and debates in contemporary social media platforms.</p> <p>During the show, audience members would call in by phone, fax, or computer chat—embodying Brecht's \"radio theorie\" of consumers becoming producers of media content. The artists describe this as an attempt to introduce performance art with audience participation into the mass medium of television. However, maintaining an ethos of \"unhindered free expression\" on the open call-in line was challenged when a viewer insulted German chancellor Helmut Kohl live on air. The station then appointed Katrin Brinkmann, a freelancer in a \"low-level\" position, who became responsible for moderating calls and kicking people off the line should they express \"obscenities or political propaganda.\"</p> <p>Baumgärtel briefly compares Brinkmann's role and that of social media content moderation policies, which social media companies have been grappling with for over a decade. He similarly draws parallels to insidious workplace practices and corporate relationships in creative cultural industries, which were also present at Van Gogh TV, and draws attention to the ways in which camaraderie and creative passion seem to foster unjust labor <strong>[End Page 420]</strong> conditions, such as long hours, hot rooms with minimal breaks, hierarchies of inequity, and gender-based discrimination. He quotes one of the founders, who states, \"The people we had were like racehorses. We always had to whip them to keep them running\" (p. 106).</p> <p>Through these admissions, we can come to understand that, rather than providing much evidence that they invented social media, there was a culture present in the Federal Republic of Germany, as there was elsewhere, in which ideals of democracy and participation from the 1970s onward inspired the first steps into the newly discovered \"cyberspace.\" This discovery became enmeshed in politics of masculinist logics of creative freedom and control.</p> <p>Other recent monographs h","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140001899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920549
Heinrich Hartmann
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic</em> by Özge Sezer <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Heinrich Hartmann (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic</em> By Özge Sezer. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023. Pp. 212. <p>Few elements of the history of the Turkish Republic have received as much attention in recent years as the topic of rural and village modernization. This is because village culture held a prominent place in the identity politics of the young Turkish state. Turkey is undoubtedly part of a broader picture here, and Özge Sezer's book <em>Forming the Modern Turkish Village</em> does justice to the renaissance of village culture as more than <strong>[End Page 395]</strong> a national phenomenon. She describes how it was anchored in Western sociological thought and practices of internal colonization, before demonstrating how the Kemalist regime built new Turkish identity politics on the idea of "going towards Anatolian villages" (p. 37 and following). Tools of this republican practice included the popular taking of "village surveys" and the so-called "homeland excursions," meant to give urban intellectuals a new sense for the cultural cradle of Turkishness. One of the particularities in this Turkish mode of rural nation building was that it was not about showcasing the cultural diversity of the countryside. Instead, intellectuals tried to rebuild a homogenous, Turkified version of superior village culture, as opposed to the ethnically diverse Ottoman rural demographic realities. As such, the intellectual project of defining the village can never be detached from other, much more violent attempts of "Turkifying" the Anatolian population, especially the Armenian genocide, but also the forceful resettlement of Greek, Arabic, and Kurdish populations.</p> <p>The biggest asset of this book is that Sezer systematically links resettlement politics with the well-known elements of village discourse in republican Turkey (she neglects however the works of Lamprou, Yilmaz, Adalet, and others on similar topics). Her particular emphasis on the program of model villages, which she develops primarily in the second part of her book, allows her to engage with a fairly technical and architectural discourse of engineering rural habitations. Sezer convincingly shows "the state's housing agenda, concentrated on rural planning within urbanist concepts" (p. 126), where villages and suburban neighborhoods differed by size but not by the guiding principles of their organization. Both addressed questions of the ideal housing facilities at affordable rates for the rural poor, including the provision of public services as well as hygienic and sanitation facilities, but also the question of how to "rationalize" a Turkic habitation culture, where the set
{"title":"Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic by Özge Sezer (review)","authors":"Heinrich Hartmann","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920549","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic</em> by Özge Sezer <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Heinrich Hartmann (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic</em> By Özge Sezer. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023. Pp. 212. <p>Few elements of the history of the Turkish Republic have received as much attention in recent years as the topic of rural and village modernization. This is because village culture held a prominent place in the identity politics of the young Turkish state. Turkey is undoubtedly part of a broader picture here, and Özge Sezer's book <em>Forming the Modern Turkish Village</em> does justice to the renaissance of village culture as more than <strong>[End Page 395]</strong> a national phenomenon. She describes how it was anchored in Western sociological thought and practices of internal colonization, before demonstrating how the Kemalist regime built new Turkish identity politics on the idea of \"going towards Anatolian villages\" (p. 37 and following). Tools of this republican practice included the popular taking of \"village surveys\" and the so-called \"homeland excursions,\" meant to give urban intellectuals a new sense for the cultural cradle of Turkishness. One of the particularities in this Turkish mode of rural nation building was that it was not about showcasing the cultural diversity of the countryside. Instead, intellectuals tried to rebuild a homogenous, Turkified version of superior village culture, as opposed to the ethnically diverse Ottoman rural demographic realities. As such, the intellectual project of defining the village can never be detached from other, much more violent attempts of \"Turkifying\" the Anatolian population, especially the Armenian genocide, but also the forceful resettlement of Greek, Arabic, and Kurdish populations.</p> <p>The biggest asset of this book is that Sezer systematically links resettlement politics with the well-known elements of village discourse in republican Turkey (she neglects however the works of Lamprou, Yilmaz, Adalet, and others on similar topics). Her particular emphasis on the program of model villages, which she develops primarily in the second part of her book, allows her to engage with a fairly technical and architectural discourse of engineering rural habitations. Sezer convincingly shows \"the state's housing agenda, concentrated on rural planning within urbanist concepts\" (p. 126), where villages and suburban neighborhoods differed by size but not by the guiding principles of their organization. Both addressed questions of the ideal housing facilities at affordable rates for the rural poor, including the provision of public services as well as hygienic and sanitation facilities, but also the question of how to \"rationalize\" a Turkic habitation culture, where the set","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920536
Michael Camp
<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond</em> by Christina Dunbar-Hester <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Camp (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond</em> By Christina Dunbar-Hester. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. xiv + 252. <p>In an introduction, four body chapters, and a conclusion, Christina Dunbar-Hester offers an ecological and technological history of San Pedro Bay, the location of both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Although each of the body chapters focuses on organic life—birds, bananas, sea otters, and whales and dolphins, respectively—key to Dunbar-Hester's analysis is the concept of infrastructural vitalism, or the belief of proponents of industrial infrastructures that the systems they managed were, in some sense, themselves "alive." This belief, according to Dunbar-Hester, came into violent conflict with the interests of genuine biological creatures. The magnitude of this clash intensified over time, for just as capitalism inexorably expands as broadly and deeply as it can, so do living beings reproduce and multiply. Dunbar-Hester's goal seems to be ultimately prescriptive, as she suggests at the end of the introduction that a deeper understanding of the historical relationships between industrial infrastructure and living creatures might help us create more sustainable and ecologically responsible forms of capitalism moving forward. Throughout the volume, abundant photographs help illustrate the subjects under consideration.</p> <p>Dunbar-Hester's body chapters dive into more detail on how activities at the port implicated organic life. For example, leaks caused by oil drilling and transportation near the bay apparently became so prevalent that an oiled bird care facility arose to care for affected animals. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2019 proposed several ideas for restoring rock habitat shoreline for birds whose living spaces were ruined by oil, although many area residents were disappointed that none of the plans went far enough to satisfy their concerns. Regarding bananas, Dunbar-Hester notes that the Port of Long Beach created an entire terminal for the sole purpose of managing imports of the fruit, which arrived on refrigerated ships and were then trucked out on highways to other areas of the Golden State, which obviously used fossil fuels. However, bananas were later received at smaller ports in the region, as the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports focused more and more over time on accommodating massive ships carrying large metal shipping containers, which usually did not contain perishable items. Historians of technology will likely find this chapter the most interesting, as it includes detailed descriptions of pumpjacks, petcoke facilities, and other innovations used in oil extraction and re
{"title":"Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond by Christina Dunbar-Hester (review)","authors":"Michael Camp","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920536","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond</em> by Christina Dunbar-Hester <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Camp (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond</em> By Christina Dunbar-Hester. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. xiv + 252. <p>In an introduction, four body chapters, and a conclusion, Christina Dunbar-Hester offers an ecological and technological history of San Pedro Bay, the location of both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Although each of the body chapters focuses on organic life—birds, bananas, sea otters, and whales and dolphins, respectively—key to Dunbar-Hester's analysis is the concept of infrastructural vitalism, or the belief of proponents of industrial infrastructures that the systems they managed were, in some sense, themselves \"alive.\" This belief, according to Dunbar-Hester, came into violent conflict with the interests of genuine biological creatures. The magnitude of this clash intensified over time, for just as capitalism inexorably expands as broadly and deeply as it can, so do living beings reproduce and multiply. Dunbar-Hester's goal seems to be ultimately prescriptive, as she suggests at the end of the introduction that a deeper understanding of the historical relationships between industrial infrastructure and living creatures might help us create more sustainable and ecologically responsible forms of capitalism moving forward. Throughout the volume, abundant photographs help illustrate the subjects under consideration.</p> <p>Dunbar-Hester's body chapters dive into more detail on how activities at the port implicated organic life. For example, leaks caused by oil drilling and transportation near the bay apparently became so prevalent that an oiled bird care facility arose to care for affected animals. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2019 proposed several ideas for restoring rock habitat shoreline for birds whose living spaces were ruined by oil, although many area residents were disappointed that none of the plans went far enough to satisfy their concerns. Regarding bananas, Dunbar-Hester notes that the Port of Long Beach created an entire terminal for the sole purpose of managing imports of the fruit, which arrived on refrigerated ships and were then trucked out on highways to other areas of the Golden State, which obviously used fossil fuels. However, bananas were later received at smaller ports in the region, as the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports focused more and more over time on accommodating massive ships carrying large metal shipping containers, which usually did not contain perishable items. Historians of technology will likely find this chapter the most interesting, as it includes detailed descriptions of pumpjacks, petcoke facilities, and other innovations used in oil extraction and re","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/tech.2024.a920528
Stuart W. Leslie
abstract:
This essay explores how film, feature and documentary, can offer a new perspective on modernist architecture, industrial design, and urban planning. Through the lens of two young directors, Kogonada and Davide Maffei, it traces the histories of two twentieth-century company towns: Ivrea, Italy, headquarters of Italian business machine giant Olivetti, and Columbus, Indiana, U.S.A., home to Cummins Inc., a global leader in diesel engine design and manufacturing. Adriano Olivetti and J. Irwin Miller shared the conviction that modernist architecture and design had a decisive role to play not just in the economic health of their respective firms but in the civic health of their surrounding communities. These companies have long abandoned the corporate idealism of their founding patrons. In film, Ivrea and Columbus have become architectural time capsules that raise important questions about the transformative power of architecture and design in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy.
摘要：这篇文章探讨了电影、故事片和纪录片如何为现代主义建筑、工业设计和城市规划提供新的视角。文章通过两位年轻导演 Kogonada 和 Davide Maffei 的镜头，追溯了两个二十世纪公司城镇的历史：意大利伊夫雷亚是意大利商业机械巨头奥利维蒂公司的总部，美国印第安纳州哥伦布则是全球柴油发动机设计和制造行业的领导者康明斯公司的所在地。阿德里亚诺-奥利维蒂和 J. 欧文-米勒都坚信，现代主义建筑和设计不仅对各自公司的经济健康，而且对周边社区的公民健康都具有决定性的作用。这些公司早已摒弃了其创始赞助人的企业理想主义。在电影中，伊夫雷亚和哥伦布已成为建筑的时间胶囊，提出了在竞争日益激烈的全球经济中建筑和设计的变革力量的重要问题。
{"title":"\"Modernism with a Soul\": Designing and Building Communities for Corporate and Civic Life","authors":"Stuart W. Leslie","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a920528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a920528","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>This essay explores how film, feature and documentary, can offer a new perspective on modernist architecture, industrial design, and urban planning. Through the lens of two young directors, Kogonada and Davide Maffei, it traces the histories of two twentieth-century company towns: Ivrea, Italy, headquarters of Italian business machine giant Olivetti, and Columbus, Indiana, U.S.A., home to Cummins Inc., a global leader in diesel engine design and manufacturing. Adriano Olivetti and J. Irwin Miller shared the conviction that modernist architecture and design had a decisive role to play not just in the economic health of their respective firms but in the civic health of their surrounding communities. These companies have long abandoned the corporate idealism of their founding patrons. In film, Ivrea and Columbus have become architectural time capsules that raise important questions about the transformative power of architecture and design in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140008598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：