Technology and Culture最新文献

{"title":"The Diffusion of \"Small\" Western Technologies in the Middle East: Invention, Use and Need in the 19th and 20th Centuries by M. Kupferschmidt (review)","authors":"Leor Halevi","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933104","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East: Invention, Use and Need in the 19th and 20th Centuries</em> by M. Kupferschmidt <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Leor Halevi (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East: Invention, Use and Need in the 19th and 20th Centuries</em><br/> By Uri M. Kupferschmidt. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023. Pp. xii + 278. <p>This book deals with the transfer of technological objects from Europe and the United States to Istanbul, Cairo, and other Middle Eastern cities. In size, these objects range from socks and light bulbs to pianos and cars. Kupferschmidt refers to them as “small” in quotation marks—to distinguish them from massive projects such as railways and hydroelectric dams, the construction of which depended, as Daniel Headrick argues in <em>The Tentacles of Progress</em> (1988), on imperial states’ core political and economic interests. But how should we think historically about the transregional and transcultural diffusion of everyday technologies, as well as novelties in cases where, despite Western dominance, imperialism was hardly at stake? Alongside social anthropologists and multinational marketing researchers, historians of technology and world trade have answered this question in various ways, illustrating the dynamics of the rejection, adoption, and spread of innovations in colonial and postcolonial states. Many of these scholars have emphasized cultural differences and adaptations. Kupferschmidt does the same, highlighting cultural factors when theorizing about the success or failure of diffusion in the Middle East.</p> <p>He contributes to this field through fascinating case studies of objects that have received little attention in a Middle Eastern context. He examines a transimperial department store chain, Orosdi-Back, which Jewish businessmen of Austro-Hungarian descent launched in Istanbul and Cairo in the 1850s. As well as fezzes, umbrellas, and watches, it exported ready-to-wear clothing from European factories to branches in “the Orient.” Additionally, Kupferschmidt refers to the usefulness and impact of four tools: eyeglasses, sewing machines, typewriters, and pianos. Why, he asks, did Arab and Turkish consumers adopt eyeglasses and sewing machines readily but typewriters gradually and pianos minimally? Mass-produced “reading” glasses and sewing machines met both social and professional needs, allowing adults suffering from presbyopia or gender discrimination to engage in “delicate work.” Facilitating their commercial success, too, were advertisements, novel marketing strategies, foreign brokers, minority retailers, and elite adopters.</p> <p>Culture was a barrier to rapid diffusion in the other two cases. Kupfer-schmidt shows what incremental innovations were needed to adapt mechanical typewriters to Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish scripts around 1900. Besides <strong","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"304 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743663","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}

{"title":"Planetarien: Wunder der Technik—Techniken des Wunderns [Planetariums: Miracles of technology—techniques of wonder] by Helen Ahner (review)","authors":"Hans-Christian Von Herrmann","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933127","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Planetarien: Wunder der Technik—Techniken des Wunderns [Planetariums: Miracles of technology—techniques of wonder]</em> by Helen Ahner <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Hans-Christian Von Herrmann (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Planetarien: Wunder der Technik—Techniken des Wunderns</em> [Planetariums: Miracles of technology—techniques of wonder]<br/> By Helen Ahner. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2023. Pp. 366. <p>The first optomechanical planetarium was opened in 1925 as part of the Department of Astronomy in the new building of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The projection method for a dome-shaped screen had been developed in the previous years by the Carl Zeiss company in Jena together with Dyckerhoff & Widmann AG, which specialized in shell constructions made of reinforced concrete. Today, the classic projectors in planetariums around the world have been mostly replaced by digital fulldome systems. Since then, there has been a renewed historical interest in this approximately hundred-year-old technical invention; examples include research by Charlotte Bigg and Katherine Boyce-Jacino. In these works, it is above all the aspects of the spectacular that attract interest. In her dissertation project, now available as a book, Helen Ahner also examines the planetarium as a place of popular science education and entertainment.</p> <p>In contrast to earlier studies that address the history of astronomical instruments between antiquity and the industrial age, investigate the sophisticated construction solution of the Zeiss engineers, or locate the planetarium in the history of modern knowledge, including the practices of art, architecture, and scientific simulation, Helen Ahner’s approach succeeds in capturing the surprise and amazement of contemporaries at this artificial experience of nature in the center of the modern city. By treating the planetarium as the “leading fossil of an archaeology of the experience of technology in the 1920s” (p. 185), Ahner thus takes up the ethnographic approach in science and technology studies founded by Stefan Beck in the 1990s.</p> <p>One of the book’s particular strengths lies in the way the author develops her own arguments in constant exchange with a wide-ranging specialist discussion. Important points of reference, alongside social science theories of practice and embodiment, include Ute Frevert’s history of emotions and the concept of “technology emotions” recently outlined by Martina Heßler. At the beginning, however, Ahner makes the simple empirical observation that the planetarium and the perceptual situation created by it was repeatedly associated with the topos of the “miracle” in the public sphere (for example, in the much-used phrase “the miracle of Jena”). At the same time, the attitude of “wonder” was an indispensable driving force behind the communication of knowledge in these places. For Ahner, the entire physical texture of the audience experien","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743493","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}

{"title":"The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History by Jo Guldi (review)","authors":"Melvin Wevers","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933123","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History</em> by Jo Guldi <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Melvin Wevers (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History</em><br/> By Jo Guldi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 465. <p>In <em>The Dangerous Art of Text Mining</em>, historian Jo Guldi explores the application of text mining in historical research. Text mining, a method for quantitatively analyzing digitized text, is utilized by Guldi to examine British parliamentary records. The approach is portrayed as a dual-edged sword, embodying both art and hazard. Guldi characterizes text mining as an art that demands specialized expertise and flexible methodologies, aligning with historians’ heuristic and hermeneutic techniques. At the same time, she warns of its dangers, such as the potential for algorithms to foster overgeneralizations, amplify biases in data, and yield conclusions that overlook historical complexities and the nuanced interpretations of past actors. Despite the book’s ostensibly alarming title, Guldi’s critique of text mining is constructive, underscoring its capacity to enhance historical research if used with discernment, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of technological solutionism that mar some big data and early digital humanities projects.</p> <p>The book is structured into three main sections. The first, “Towards a Smarter Data Science,” outlines Guldi’s methodological approach, advocating for a seamless integration of data science with historical research’s nuanced source criticism. The book adopts a somewhat antagonistic stance toward data science, portraying it as naive regarding data and algorithmic bias. <strong>[End Page 1033]</strong> Guldi posits that historians are uniquely positioned to prevent the uncritical application of algorithms to historical data. While data science studies often overlook such biases (as pointed out by R. Benjamin, <em>Race after Technology</em>, 2019; C. O’Neil, <em>Weapons of Math Destruction</em>, 2016), similar issues are evident in digital humanities and digital history. Think, for example, of the frequent use in digital history of topic modeling algorithms as exploratory tools without inspecting the degree of robustness of the models. Historians could also benefit from work in areas such as explainable AI, where initiatives are being advanced to augment the transparency of AI models, ensuring that users not only trust but also comprehend the underlying mechanisms and rationale of the algorithms employed in their research (for example, Molnar, <em>Interpretable Machine Learning</em>, 2022). Concurrently, information retrieval scholars have developed metrics to evaluate search strategy efficacy. Such metrics deserve more attention in Guldi’s book.</p> <p>Guldi presents the strategy of critical search, which relies on the critical use of multiple algorithms ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743494","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}

{"title":"Radiophilia by Carolyn Birdsall (review)","authors":"Richard Legay","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933125","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Radiophilia</em> by Carolyn Birdsall <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Richard Legay (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Radiophilia</em><br/> By Carolyn Birdsall. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. Pp. 279. <p>Just in time to mark radio’s first century in many countries, Carolyn Birdsall’s <em>Radiophilia</em> is a particularly welcome and original addition to the scholarship of both radio studies and broadcasting history. This ambitious book introduces a new concept, “radiophilia,” understood as the attachment to or love for radio, and goes on to successfully unravel its various constitutive elements from the early days of the wireless to today, in multiple geographical contexts.</p> <p>To undertake this task, the book often balances between overarching questions and concrete examples and is split into four chapters, simply named “Loving,” “Knowing,” “Saving,” and “Sharing.” This rather unusual approach of one-word progressive verbs as chapter titles is actually an excellent way for Birdsall to explicate her concept, as she can focus on what ties people (i.e., practices and emotions) to the medium over time. In the first pages, the attention is put on loving radio, both as action and practice, concerning individuals and groups. This is analyzed first in a historical manner, showing various forms of radiophilia over time, then through the lens of history of emotions, and finally in a multisensory and multimedia dimension. The book then moves on to the topic of knowing radio, shedding light on knowledge production as radiophilia. This chapter includes the communities formed around this technical hobby in the early days of radio, the importance of regulators and the industry, and the relationship between knowledge and affect, especially present with fan culture. In “Saving,” the author delves into the various shapes taken by radiophiliacs to preserve and hang on to the ephemeral sounds of the medium. Interestingly, this chapter includes amateur and professional actors as well as analogue and digital practices, revealing the width of the topic. The fourth chapter explores the issue of how enthusiasts have shared their love of radio over the last century. The net cast to catch the heterogeneity of this question is wide as individual, local, and national activities, practices, objects, spaces, and curatorial choices are all included. Overall, the author successfully balances an ambitious new and overarching concept with more concrete examples, and by doing so brings in a wide range of geographical and historical contexts, which makes the result particularly convincing. Interestingly, the author’s personal attachment to radio is also discussed on a few occasions in the book, which helps with understanding her perspective on the topic at hand and will likely echo many readers’ own relationship with radio. <strong>[End Page 1037]</strong></p> <p>In regard to the book’s contribution to the existing scholarship, a fe","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743503","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}

{"title":"The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)","authors":"David Foster","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933140","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II</em> by Terrance Furgerson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David Foster (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II</em><br/> By Terrance Furgerson. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 403. <p>Today, Dallas is a major hub within the global aerospace network. But until 1940, aircraft design and production in the United States was concentrated on the two coasts. In this book, Terrance Furgerson shows how and why Dallas got its start in the aviation industry on the eve of World War II and how the showcase North American Aviation (NAA) plant, in turn, brought industrial-scale manufacturing into the heart of North Texas. Texas had long been a key region in the nation’s military activities, going back to the state’s incorporation into the United States in 1845. Early innovations in land- and sea-based aviation had been going on at military bases in San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and elsewhere across the state since the end of World War I, as Texas’s open spaces and favorable weather attracted aviation visionaries, pioneers, and enthusiasts.</p> <p>The Dallas Story is a welcome addition to the thin extant historiography of the aviation and aerospace industry in Texas. Furgerson’s focus on the political-industrial story in Texas complements Barbara Ganson’s recent Texas Takes Wing (2014) and serves as an important bridge between older titles such as E. C. Barksdale’s The Genesis of the Aviation Industry in North Texas (1958) and Roger Bilstein and Jay Miller’s Aviation in Texas (1985), as well as the numerous studies of the Cold War and post–Cold War eras that invariably center on Texas’s key aerospace role within the broader military-industrial milieu.</p> <p>NAA’s Dallas plant was up and running by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, but the demands of wartime production rates, design iterations, and manufacturing expansion stressed the available skilled-labor pool. Further distractions came with an endless stream of official visitors to the Dallas plant for tours and the encouragement of the plant employees. Yet within a few short years, the NAA Dallas plant had produced thousands of AT-6 Texan trainers, B-24 Liberator bombers, and P-51 Mustang fighters for the war effort.</p> <p>The book is aptly titled. This is truly a story of Dallas-based interests providing the driving force to bring a new industry into the area at a time before the nation’s military-industrial system was widespread, mature, and based out of Washington, D.C. At that time, Texas had a strong aviation culture that had materially contributed to the technical and operational innovations for air travel and mail delivery. Such prominent national Texans as Vice President John Nance Garner and Speaker of the ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743504","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}

{"title":"Architecture's Model Environments by Lisa Moffitt (review)","authors":"Kristine Grønning Ericson","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933142","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Architecture’s Model Environments</em> by Lisa Moffitt <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kristine Grønning Ericson (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Architecture’s Model Environments</em><br/> By Lisa Moffitt. London: UCL Press, 2023. Pp. 209. <p>In contemporary architectural practice, common methods for representing and analyzing airflow include computer-generated simulations and static two-dimensional diagrams. These techniques have limitations, particularly for architects engaged in the early stages of the design process. As architect Lisa Moffitt writes in <em>Architecture’s Model Environments</em>, previously understudied physical models from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in Europe and North America may suggest alternative approaches to visualizing and designing with airflow in the present. These approaches are especially resonant at a time of changing climates, evolving relationships to airborne disease, and persisting environmental inequities.</p> <p>Moffitt’s book is the most recent addition to UCL Press’s Design Research in Architecture series. Over the past decade, “design research” has become a catchall term for diverse approaches to incorporating multidisciplinary research methods into architectural design practice. In this contribution to the series, Moffitt presents a method of design research that combines historical case study analysis with construction, experimental testing, and exhibition of physical models. Moffitt argues that building and interacting with physical models can provoke new insights about historical episodes in the visualization of air. These historical precedents, in turn, inspire speculation about built environments at multiple scales in the present.</p> <p>The book has four central chapters. It begins with a chapter on Moffitt’s own construction of “environmental models,” which she defines as “instruments which create controlled environments that make the phenomena of airflow visible in relation to an architectural model” (ch. 2). The subsequent three chapters present historical case studies of environmental models, each exploring resonances with Moffitt’s own experiments (chs. 3–5).</p> <p>In chapter 2, Moffitt categorizes her environmental models into three types: wind tunnels, water tables, and filling boxes. These models, created as <strong>[End Page 1068]</strong> part of Moffitt’s dissertation research at the University of Edinburgh, draw on her experiences working as an architect in North America in the 2000s. Moffitt introduces a do-it-yourself approach to building each prototype. Extensive documentation of the design and construction process for each iteration provides readers with resources to replicate the prototypes using laser cutters, 3D printers, and traditional carpentry tools. Moffitt notes that such physical models make the diffuse, complex behavior of air more tangible and intuitive for designers by visualizing flows usi","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743509","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}

{"title":"The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain by Natasha Szuhan (review)","authors":"Agata Ignaciuk","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933124","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain</em> by Natasha Szuhan <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Agata Ignaciuk (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain</em><br/> By Natasha Szuhan. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2023. Pp. 294. <p>Natasha Szuhan’s objective in this history of the Family Planning Association (FPA), a leading organization in the British contraceptive arena, established in 1931 and absorbed into the NHS during the 1970s, is to highlight the FPA’s role in demystifying and legitimizing contraception and sex as medical and social phenomena (p. 1). Drawing on the archives of the FPA held in the Wellcome Collection and dialoguing with the recent expansive wave of scholarship on contraceptive technologies, markets, and expertise in Britain during the central decades of the twentieth century (including Claire Jones, <em>The Business of Birth Control</em>, 2020; Jessica Borge, <em>Protective Practices</em>, 2020; and Caroline Rusterholz, <em>Women’s Medicine</em>, 2020), the distinctive value of Szuhan’s contribution lies in her crafting of the FPA story as a scientific and, to a lesser extent, social biography. Chapters are themed around the organization’s involvement in developing standards for contraceptive-gynecological care, testing and endorsing specific contraceptive technologies, conducting public health research into contraceptive practices and effectiveness, and lobbying on medical issues. While exploring relations between the FPA and the British government, the contraceptive industry, and medical lobbying groups, Szuhan also highlights the contributions made by individual physicians, researchers, and leading contraceptive firms. <strong>[End Page 1035]</strong></p> <p>Drawing on a vast and meticulously documented source base, <em>The Family Planning Association</em> imaginatively contributes to many key themes in the social history of mid-twentieth-century contraceptive technologies, such as the design of spaces and protocols for birth control clinics during the 1930s (ch. 2), the testing of barrier methods and spermicides (ch. 4), the uneasy relationships between family planning organizations and manufacturers (chs. 3–5), and how contraceptive lobbying groups operated in the intersecting arenas of state regulatory bodies, emerging national health authorities, medical elites, industry, and voluntary organizations (ch. 5). Centered on the professional biography of Helena Wright and including an analysis of her writing for popular and specialized audiences, chapter 3 will particularly appeal to wider audiences interested in contraceptive standards and the transnational biographies and careers of women physicians. The interesting stories of FPA disagreements with contraceptive manufacturers and the British Medical Association ar","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743492","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}

{"title":"Im Medienlabor der US-amerikanischen Industrieforschung: Die gemeinsamen Wurzeln von Massenmedien und Bürokratie 1870–1950 [In the media laboratory of US-American industrial research: The common roots of mass media and bureaucracy 1870–1950] by Nadine Taha (review)","authors":"Felix Selgert","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933133","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Im Medienlabor der US-amerikanischen Industrieforschung: Die gemeinsamen Wurzeln von Massenmedien und Bürokratie 1870–1950 [In the media laboratory of US-American industrial research: The common roots of mass media and bureaucracy 1870–1950]</em> by Nadine Taha <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Felix Selgert (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Im Medienlabor der US-amerikanischen Industrieforschung: Die gemeinsamen Wurzeln von Massenmedien und Bürokratie 1870–1950<br/> [In the media laboratory of US-American industrial research: The common roots of mass media and bureaucracy 1870–1950]</em><br/> By Nadine Taha. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 319. <p>In <em>Im Medienlabor der US-amerikanischen Industrieforschung</em>, based on her dissertation, Nadine Taha approaches American industrial research labs from a media studies perspective. In six case studies, partly based on the archives of DuPont, General Electric, and Kodak, the author aims to identify the common roots of mass and telecommunication media and the media of modern bureaucracies. The first technologies that spring to mind are the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter. Although all these technologies receive a mention, the six case studies refer to much less apparent technologies, including the paper-based roll film that simplified photography (ch. 2), a photographic sound recording and playback device called pallophotophone (ch. 5), a thirteen-month calendar (ch. 6), as well as cloud photography (ch. 7). Even if some of these technologies—most notably photography—fall into the mass media and bureaucratic technology category, this common feature is much less evident than for the technologies mentioned above. Taha tries to overcome this shortcoming by addressing the shared history of these media inventions and the technologies of bureaucracy (ch. 3). Here, the author refers to the control revolution (Beninger, <em>The Control Revolution</em>, 1989) and the rise of modern management (Chandler, <em>The Visible Hand</em>, 1977) as shared drivers of mass media and bureaucratic technologies. However, I read chapter 3 as if the author is more concerned with the bureaucratization of innovation in the form of industrial research departments than with the common roots of mass media and bureaucratic technologies. The idea that the bureaucratization of the innovation process can be traced back to the control revolution, the managerial revolution, and a more competitive market environment during the Progressive Era is a stimulating thought that could have been investigated more systematically.</p> <p>For Taha, the similarities between mass and bureaucratic media are also characterized by dual-use cases. An example of this is General Electric’s pallophotophone, which was aimed at the film industry and radio broadcasting but, in the end, failed in the market. However, the innovation was used in the company’s research department for a long time to pr","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743498","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}

{"title":"Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the Globe by Ross Melnick (review)","authors":"Giles Scott-Smith","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933113","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the Globe</em> by Ross Melnick <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Giles Scott-Smith (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the Globe</em><br/> By Ross Melnick. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. 503. <p>This is a bold work of substantial proportions, setting out as it does to reframe our understanding of Hollywood as an overseas actor and purveyor of U.S. soft power. It does so by focusing like never before on the global network of cinemas owned and run by the major U.S. studios, instead of on the films themselves. In doing so, Melnick brings to light the all-encompassing, full-spectrum package that Hollywood delivered for nine decades to audiences around the world. The author refers early on to his work as “the first political, cultural, and industrial history of Hollywood’s foreign ownership and operation of hundreds of cinemas” (p. 2). The cinemas, with their architectural and ornamental splendor and their cornucopial abundance of consumable goods for the viewing publics, were definitely the embassies of soft power the book makes them out to be. While previous work has often focused on film production (for instance: Acland, <em>Screen Traffic</em>, 2003; Trumbour, <em>Selling Hollywood to the World</em>, 2002; Segrave, <em>American Films Abroad</em>, 1997), this title brings an empirical analysis of the structural power of film exhibition networks and the many commercial and cultural struggles that this involved.</p> <p>Twentieth Century Fox owned hundreds of cinemas across Africa and Australasia. MGM, in partnership with Loew, owned prime urban sites across Latin America. Paramount presented the heights of luxury at film palaces in <strong>[End Page 1013]</strong> Brazil and France. Warner Bros. ran an international network that spanned Eurasia. RKO, Universal, and United Artists were also involved, but to a lesser extent. The book, separated into twenty chapters spread across six continentally focused sections, aims unequivocally for full global coverage: Europe, Australasia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia. As the ideal outlets for presenting the appealing and seemingly unlimited facets of Americana to susceptible foreign publics, the physical presence of these cinemas also elicited widespread indignation and resistance from those who objected to the overpowering omnipotence of Americanization. Hollywood—with its unmatchable stars and glamour and relentless advertising campaigns—went a long way to ensure that film was marketed and experienced in the ways that Hollywood thought it should be. Maximum experience and maximum profit were the twin goals. Not surprisingly, rival local cinema chains could not abide their obvious second-class status in their own backyards. On the other hand, armed with all the gusto and glamour Hollywood ","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"166 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743484","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}

{"title":"British Nuclear Weapons and the Test Ban: Squaring the Circle of Defence and Arms Control, 1974–82 by John Walker (review)","authors":"Christoph Laucht","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a933138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a933138","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>British Nuclear Weapons and the Test Ban: Squaring the Circle of Defence and Arms Control, 1974–82</em> by John Walker <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christoph Laucht (bio) </li> </ul> <em>British Nuclear Weapons and the Test Ban: Squaring the Circle of Defence and Arms Control, 1974–82</em><br/> By John Walker. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. Pp. 174. <p>John Walker’s latest book marks an important study of the complex relationship between nuclear weapons technology, arms control, and questions of nuclear (non)proliferation. It examines British intentions, motivations, aims, and objectives in the negotiations between the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States over a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) from 1974 to 1982. While Lorna Arnold, Richard Moore, Toshihiro Higuchi, and Walker himself in his earlier work have largely focused on the test ban debate of the 1950s leading up to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, <em>British Nuclear Weapons and the Test Ban</em> sheds light on a thus far neglected aspect of nuclear arms control, or what Walker also refers to as “the Holy Grail of arms control since the 1950s” (p. 1). The author pays particular attention to the likely impacts of a CTBT on the reliability and safety of the United Kingdom’s nuclear arsenal.</p> <p>Apart from an introduction (ch. 1) and conclusion (ch. 6), <em>British Nuclear Weapons and the Test Ban</em> contains four main chapters. For heuristic purposes, the main body opens with an overview of the CTBT negotiations that took place in Geneva between 1977 and 1982 (ch. 2). During the talks, the Callaghan and Thatcher governments faced a fundamental dilemma: on the one hand, they aspired to a CTBT as an international measure to reduce nuclear stockpiles. On the other, they worried that a test ban might obstruct designing new warheads and jeopardize the reliability and safety of the existing British stockpile. Walker reminds us that this quandary resembled the situation that the Macmillan government encountered between 1954 <strong>[End Page 1061]</strong> and 1958 when the United Kingdom sought to complete its thermonuclear weapons program ahead of a moratorium on testing coming into effect. At the same time, practical issues around verification of a CTBT through National Seismic Stations added complexity to the negotiations.</p> <p>The three chapters that follow focus more specifically on key themes concerning British interests in the talks. From 1974, it became apparent that the United Kingdom required continued nuclear testing on the Nevada Test Site in the United States to proceed with the development of hardened warheads for the Chevaline upgrade of the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs; ch. 3). Simultaneously, testing was needed to ensure the safety and reliability of the United Kingdom’s stockpile (ch. 4). As Walker shows, British dependence on the United States—both techno","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141743502","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}